Banks Therapy for Anxiety Depression and Stress

I see therapy as a partnership wherein my role is to help you to move towards the life you want to live. I am a strong believer in the power of focusing on one’s values as a tool to move you forward in life. It has been my experience that once people begin to make choices based on their values versus buying into their critical and self-doubting thoughts/trying to avoid feelings they do not want to have, that they are able to move quickly into a state of self-respect and enjoy a meaningful life. My role is to help facilitate your self-awareness to help to you identify what you value, what is currently working in your life, and what is getting in the way of you living the kind of life you want to live.

My therapeutic style is a mixture of ACT, DBT, and CBT (for more details on what these are and how they differ, please see my article on this topic). I consider myself primarily to be an Acceptance and Commitment (ACT) based therapist. This means that I focus on mindfulness, assisting you with allowing your emotions to be present, and changing the relationship you have with your unhelpful thoughts in service of you living a value-laden life. When needed I use DBT skills to assist people with crisis management skills as well as interpersonal effectiveness. I use CBT to assist in the determination of core beliefs (our most basic beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world around us) as well as to assist people in shifting their perspective via reframing (seeing other possibilities in how to look at a situation).

I have been blessed with tremendous opportunities to become highly skilled in the use of these three areas. In the past I worked for a community mental health agency that focused primarily on CBT. While there I worked with a variety of mental health issues including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and eating disorders. Since then I have worked at a juvenile detention center and a community agency. More recently I have worked for over four years at Linden Oaks Hospital in Naperville in their General Mental Health outpatient program as a clinical therapist serving a wide array of mental health challenges. This program was heavily DBT based. For the past year I have been in the Adult Anxiety program which is exclusively an ACT based program. I have seen the most significant improvement in people's’ lives using ACT and as such this is what I want to offer you- the opportunity for life altering change towards becoming more of who you really are based on what matters most to you.

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Monday	Open	8am	9pm
Tuesday	Open	8am	9pm
Wednesday	Open	8am	9pm
Thursday	Open	8am	9pm
Friday	Open	8am	9pm
Saturday	Open	8am	9pm
Sunday	Open	8am	9pm