Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in Greenacres, and Online Across Florida

The right tools to help you get unstuck and move forward.

What Is CBT?

Your mind doesn’t just get busy. It gets loud and repetitive, and it can be hard to escape the inner chatter that seems to go on without your permission.

You might replay conversations, second-guess decisions, or try to think your way to certainty. But the more you try to untangle your thoughts, the more tangled up you feel.

You’ve probably read about coping skills, maybe even tried a few. Some helped a little. Most didn’t stick.

That’s usually not a motivation problem. It’s a pattern problem. If you weren’t motivated, you wouldn’t be here!

CBT focuses on problems stemming from your thought and behavior patterns and helps you identify and implement solutions you are willing to use. That’s an important distinction - solutions you are willing to use. If you aren’t open to a particular strategy, it’s not going to work for you, and it’s my job to help you find a different one.

Research tells us that CBT is the gold standard for treating the most common problems for which people seek out therapy:

Alcohol and drug use
Anxiety
Depression
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
Personality Disorders
Personal Growth

How Does CBT Work?

Sessions are active and practical. CBT isn’t about forcing positive thinking or arguing with every thought you have.

It’s about slowing things down enough to see what’s actually happening. First, you learn how your thoughts, emotions, and reactions connect. Then we work on changing how that pattern plays out in real time.

We might:

break down a situation that’s been replaying in your head.
identify the exact thought that hooked you.
look at what your mind is predicting or assuming.
test whether that thought is accurate, useful, or neither.
practice a different way of responding while you’re still feeling stuck.

In our work together, we’re not just talking about your thoughts. We are:

mapping them.
testing them.
adjusting how you respond to them.

Sometimes we’ll talk, sometimes we’ll role play, and sometimes we’ll do in-session exercises to halt distressing thoughts and help you make sense of them. So instead of getting pulled deeper into overthinking, you start to develop control over how you think and respond. You gain the power of choice.

The Benefits of CBT: How It Helps in Real Life

This is the kind of work that helps you:

step out of mental spirals before they take over your day.
respond to anxiety without immediately going into overdrive.
stop treating every thought like it requires your full attention.
resist the impulsive voice that says. “I want what I want when I want it.”
recognize when you’re about to follow a path that’s had negative consequences in the past.

The way you think affects how you feel and how you behave, and you have more control over those processes than you might imagine.

Who Does CBT Work Best For?

CBT tends to work especially well if you:

feel mentally “on” all the time and can’t easily shut it off.
want solutions and practical tools, not just a place to vent.
have tried to think your way out of problems but keep ending up in the same place.
like understanding how things work — but also want that understanding to change something.
worry about relapsing and want to feel confident when cravings and triggers show up to tempt you.

How CBT Fits into My Overall Approach

CBT is one of the main tools I use, but it’s not the only one.

Depending on what you need, we may also draw on:

DBT skills for emotional regulation and distress tolerance.
Solution-focused work to build momentum and follow-through.
Mindfulness to help you step out of automatic reactions.
Strength-based work to find your strengths and build on them.
Positive Psychology to ground your perspective in reality rather than chaos.
Twelve-Step Facilitation to get you comfortable with living in the solution instead of the problem.

Why I Specialize in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Evidence has shown us that CBT works better than talking alone.

Dont’ get me wrong — talking is great. You can develop a lot of insight through talking, especially when you’re talking with a trained professional.

But here’s the thing: A lot of the clients I work with are already insightful people — people who wake up with anxiety in the middle of the night and surf the internet for insight. People who’ve been using drugs and alcohol for many years use insight as a tool for finding and getting their drug of choice. Self-professed personal growth junkies have enough insight to fill a library.

You already understand a lot about why you think the way you do. But insight doesn’t automatically change patterns. CBT takes what you understand intellectually and turns it into something you can actually apply in the moment.

I have anchored my practice in cognitive behavioral therapies because

The research shows how well it works.
I’ve had years of experience using CBT to help clients battle addiction, break through their anxiety and enhance their personal growth.
I've witnessed firsthand the transformative impact this approach has had on my clients’ wellbeing and quality of life.

One of the most common questions I’m asked about using CBT is:

“What if I don’t want to look back at the past?”

With CBT, we do spend some time reviewing the past - not to assign blame or make you feel like crap about yourself, but as a source of information.

Information is power. Information arms you to make decisions that serve you instead of hurting you. Self-awareness gives you the gift of choice, and there’s nothing more empowering than choice.

In exploring the problems that brought you to therapy, I lean full-in on building your confidence and resilience.