Our counselors are experienced in supporting clients through a wide range of challenges, including stress, emotional dysregulation, depression, anxiety, personality disorders, addiction, relationship difficulties, personal growth, trauma, and more. As a humanistic and client-centered practice, we are committed to delivering quality mental healthcare to individuals of all identities and backgrounds, understanding the impact that systems of power and oppression can have on mental health.
Read more about each counselor, their specializations, and therapeutic orientations in our ‘Our Team‘ section. Our providers are dedicated to creating affirming spaces for deep emotional healing, exploring trauma and distress stored in the body, and helping you tap into your inherent strengths. We strive to empower clients to navigate the world with authenticity, purpose, and connection, while recognizing the broader societal forces that influence well-being.
At Gainesville Healing House we work with children (4+), adults and seniors. We provide therapy and assessment services for individuals, families, and couples. Our practice specializes in trauma recovery. However, we are passionate about helping those struggling with depression, anxiety disorders, addictive behaviors, relationship difficulties, social difficulties, academic challenges, life transitions, personality disorders, ADHD, Autism and more.
We can provide individualized care that may include ADHD/Autism assessments, development and implementation of coping skills, psychoeducation, and deep emotional healing work through somatic healing modalities. We provide a truly tailored therapeutic approach as we believe that everyone who walks in our door is extremely unique. We will work as your team to help support you in every single step of your journey. Our ultimate goal is you are able to not only face the struggles that bring you through our door but whatever struggles may lie ahead with compassion and understanding for yourself.
“The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.”
― Sigmund Freud
“The past affects the present even without our being aware of it.”
― Francine Shapiro
Talk Therapy plays a critical role in the treatment of emotional and mental health conditions. Most of our life is interpreted and responded to on an unconscious level. If there is unresolved conflict in the unconscious or maladaptive coping strategies stored we will likely struggle in many aspects of our life. Experience changes brain chemistry and brain structure which results in emotional and mental health conditions. Talking through issues, exploring unresolved emotions and understanding your patterns will allow you to make changes in your life. Successful psychotherapy has been shown to manifest in mood changes, more emotional regulation and increase in overall happiness. Research also shows that psychotherapy alters brain function and in certain cases will alter the brain over time similar to medications with more beneficial long term effects. Psychotherapy helps us challenge old and unhealthy neural connections and make new ones.
We provide an integrative psychotherapy approach and have experience with Psychodynamic, Humanistic, Gestalt, and Cognitive Behavioral approaches. The approach will be tailored to the person in order to provide the best quality care. Psychotherapy is a collaborative process built on the relationship between the patient and therapist. It is critical you find a therapist you feel safe with in order to embark on this vulnerable and powerful journey.
Find some helpful articles below for more information on Psychotherapy!
Mindfulness meditation is an ancient practice that has been heavily researched in the last few decades and found to be helpful for a variety of conditions and for improving general well-being.
Mindfulness can be described as a state of intentional, non-judgmental attention to your experience of the present moment. Meditation and other techniques are used to cultivate an increased capacity for mindfulness, which can help us relate to our experiences in more skillful ways. Using these techniques, we can develop healthier relationships with our minds, bodies, emotions, and with other people. Mindfulness training helps you develop a consistent, skillful, and dynamic mindfulness meditation practice.
Find some helpful articles below for more information on Mindfulness!
“Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. Most previous explorations focused their investigations on the mind.”
― Dr. Alexander Lowen, Bioenergetics
Bioenergetics is a form of therapy designed to promote deep level healing. It promotes an understanding of the self that we often avoid. This method of therapy promotes emotional expression utilizing the entire body. The idea is that as we face trauma we develop muscular tension in our bodies as a response. For instance, a child is taught that what they say doesn’t matter may develop a tense jaw. We have basic understanding of this demonstrated by sayings such as, “you’re a pain in the neck” or “I have too much on my shoulders”. Our emotions directly impact of physiology. In bioenergetics we utilize somatic experience and the principle that the body remembers everything.
We often utilize psychological defenses to avoid uncomfortable truths. However, our body always embraces and expresses the truth. Through the body we can move past the defenses and into ourselves. Tapping in to the truth that our bodies carry can be very powerful. As Dr. Alexander Lowen stated,” The primary nature of every human being is to be open to life and love. Being guarded, armored, distrustful and enclosed is second nature in our culture. It is the means we adopt to protect ourselves against being hurt, but when such attitudes become characterological or structured in the personality, that constitute a more severe hurt and create a greater crippling than the one originally suffered.”
This method of therapy can be very powerful. It is great for individuals who feel that something is missing from their lives or feel stuck despite utilizing other therapeutic approaches. Individuals who have gone through traditional talk therapy and realize the need for a deeper level healing could benefit greatly from this method.
Find some helpful links below for more information on bioenergetics analysis!
“DBT’s catchphrase of developing a life worth living means you’re not just surviving; rather, you have good reasons for living. I’m also getting better at keeping another dialectic in mind: On the one hand, the disorder decimates all relationships and social functions, so you’re basically wandering in the wasteland of your own failure, and yet you have to keep walking through it, gathering the small bits of life that can eventually go into creating a life worth living. To be in the desolate badlands while envisioning the lush tropics without being totally triggered again isn’t easy, especially when life seems so effortless for everyone else.”
― Kiera Van Gelder
Dialectical Behavioral Inform Therapy (DBT) is an empirically validated form of therapy. This method requires regular and active participation in and out of therapy sessions including daily logging, journaling, practicing skills, and practicing new behaviors. This method is widely recognized to help treat emotional dysregulation or reactivity such as found with individuals struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder. It is also proven effective in treating depression, bulimia, binge-eating, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic-stress disorder, and substance abuse.
Find some Helpful articles below to learn more about DBT!
“Changing the memories that form the way we see ourselves also changes
the way we view others. Therefore, our relationships, job performance, what we are willing to do or are able to resist, all move in a positive direction.”
― Francine Shapiro
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a well-researched and considered an empirically validated form of treatment that utilizes the brain’s natural processing mechanism to reprocess information. Through bilateral stimulation we are able to target specific neural pathways in order to desensitize and reprocess information that causes issues in an individual’s life. This was originally developed to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in veterans coming back from wars. Since development it has been researched extensively in the treatment of trauma. Recently, we have started to find it beneficial in treating depression, anxiety, phobias, addictions, and more.
Find some helpful articles below for more information on EMDR!
Talk Therapy:
BENEFITS OF TALK THERAPY
LEARNING MORE ABOUT PSYCHOTHERAPY
UNDERSTANDING PSYCHOTHERAPY
HOW PSYCHOTHERAPY CHANGES THE BRAIN
Mindfulness Training:
WHAT IS MINDFULNESS?
WHEN SCIENCE MEETS MINDFULNESS
MINDFULNESS-BASED INTERVENTIONS
Bioenergetic Analysis:
BIOENERGETIC THERAPY
LEARN MORE ABOUT BIOENERGETIC ANALYSIS
Dialectical Behavioral Inform Therapy:
ABOUT DBT
DBT AS A TREATMENT FOR BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing:
WHAT IS EMDR
EMDR THERAPY
MORE ON EMDR