About Psychotherapy

     Psychotherapy is a partnership and collaboration between a professional therapist and a person seeking change. The person seeking change, often desires a deeper understanding of them self as well as changes in their present behavior. A psychologist is trained to help people understand their feelings, thoughts and behaviors and to facilitate personal growth. These growth changes can include increased self-awareness, perceptual shifts relating to life, self and others, new thought processes and the development of new approaches to life. Often this new perspective can result in deep, meaningful changes and personal peace. Life begins to change and shift in response to the new perspective that is adopted. The process of change has begun.

Research suggests that therapy effectively decreases an individual’s anxiety and depression and its related symptoms. It also supports the ideas that emotional and physical health are closely linked and that therapy can improve a person’s overall health status.

I am trained in depth psychotherapy as well as problem-focused therapy. I use a variety of specific types of therapy and therapeutic tools depending on each client’s needs and goals. There are many hundred different types of therapies available today. I am trained and experienced in five major types. They are Cognitive-Behavior Therapy(CBT), Interpersonal Psychotherapy, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Control Mastery and Transpersonal Therapy, Of these types of therapy, I use aspects of each depending on the needs of the client. Since psychotherapy is a partnership and a collaboration, the client’s goals and their desired outcomes are most important.

The Process of Change

     Each of us has within our self a natural tendency to grow emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually in a healthy, positive direction. This tendency can become lost when we take on negative ideas about our self that we learned from others. Most often we are not even aware that we hold these old ideas. The growth process possible in psychotherapy is to question them. Are they working for us in our life? Through this awareness and questioning process, we can begin to reclaim our natural self-growth tendency. As we become aware of newer, more updated versions of the self we want to be, our life begins to take on a new form. We basically become “unstuck” from our old beliefs as we reach for the next level of growth. This frees up our innate tendency to move forward towards our true and best feeling potential.

The process of growth and re-engagement is to start fresh with an up-dated notion of the self, a notion we envision in our happiest moments. By becoming more aware of our thoughts, feelings and emotions, we can change the kind of life we are living into one that is more in keeping with the vision we have always had for ourselves.
 

Heidi K. Minnick,Ph.D.
Clinical Psychologist