Our Specialties
At Thalassa Psychological Services, each clinician brings unique expertise in distinct areas of mental health assessment and treatment. This ensures that you receive targeted and effective interventions tailored to your specific needs. All of our clinicians work through a trauma-informed lens, prioritizing safety, trust, collaboration, agency, and empowerment. These values foster a path towards emotional healing and personal growth. Whether you're navigating anxiety, depression, relationship challenges, or other mental health concerns, we understand that safety and trust take time to build within the therapeutic relationship. Keep reading to learn more about our approaches and specialities.
Experiential Therapy
Do you sometimes struggle to know what you feel, or to find a way to talk about it with others? Have you been in therapy that didn’t really get to the heart of what you’re struggling with internally, and felt frustrated by just filling in your therapist on the week’s events? An experiential approach emphasizes the importance of felt experience in the here-and-now and identifies barriers to the direct expression of emotion. Working experientially with patients allows the patient and therapist to identify protective strategies that keep emotions at a distance. Once a person is able to access their emotions more fully in the sessions, they may make connections or have realizations as a result that can open up unconscious material or struggles and make them more conscious. We see the value experiential approaches to therapy can have in treatment, including Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) and Accelerated Experiential Psychotherapy (AEDP), as they help us partner with you to internally explore and understand your emotions in a deep and transformative way. By allowing access to unconscious feelings and impulses, even through experiential therapy like art therapy, patients can be surprised by what comes up in their artwork unconsciously, and processing this together can allow for a different type of movement in treatment.
Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP)
TFP is a specialized form of psychodynamic therapy developed to treat individuals who struggle with personality pathology including Borderline Personality Disorder. These conditions are characterized by an unintegrated or unstable sense of self; difficulty with management of self-esteem; intense, chaotic, or unstable interpersonal relationships; difficulties with impulse control; and difficulty managing aggression and anger. The therapeutic process begins with a consultation phase, which includes a comprehensive clinical assessment, specific diagnostic feedback, and treatment recommendations. Agreement regarding the parameters of treatment is collaboratively established, often including the need for additional structure in the patient’s life. In some cases, consultation with family or significant others is needed to ensure effective support for treatment. Given the intensive nature of this approach, a twice-weekly frequency of meetings is ideal, but in many instances a weekly frequency is sufficient. The focus of treatment is the patient’s lived inner experience as it plays out in their interactions with the therapist. This allows for an in-vivo exploration of the reactions, beliefs, and unconscious motives that support maladaptive patterns of behavior.
Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT)
EFT is a specialized form of couples treatment that identifies repetitive negative cycles of interaction between partners that are driven and supported by unacknowledged and unmet attachment needs.This form of therapy places special importance on understanding the need for emotional safety and risk-taking in order to strengthen the foundational bond of any relationship. Treatment begins with a brief and free-of-charge phone consultation with each partner, followed by 1-3 meetings to assess the main issues in the relationship. Then each partner meets once individually with the therapist. The next joint meeting is focused on initial feedback, goal-setting, and outlining the course of treatment. Once all parties are in agreement, treatment proceeds weekly in 60 minute increments and includes an experiential component in which partners practice new ways of communicating with and listening to each other.
Child Life
A Certified child life specialist plays a vital role in promoting children's health and well-being by utilizing their expertise to assist children and their families navigate stressful experiences across different environments. Child Life Specialists have traditionally worked in hospital settings supporting children and families cope with the stress and challenges of hospitalization and/or medical procedures. More recently, Child Life Specialists have expanded their work beyond hospitals to include but not limited to work in doctors offices, not-for-profits and private practice. Child Life Specialists use a variety of therapeutic techniques and age-appropriate interventions to help children understand and manage their experiences including play, art, and other creative activities to facilitate communication and expression of feeling.
Additional Areas of Treatment
•ADHD •Anger Management •Anxiety •Behavioral Issues •Body Image Concerns •Child Life •Chronic Illness and Pain •Depression •Dissociative Disorders •Divorce •Domestic Violence •Dual Diagnosis •Eating Disorders •Family Conflict •Grief •Infidelity •Life Transitions •Marital and Premarital •Men's Issues •Mood Disorders •Personality Disorders •Pregnancy, Prenatal, Postpartum •Relationship Issues •Self Esteem •Sexual Abuse •Trauma and PTSD •Women's Issues
