Strategic Mental Health Therapy and Counseling in Madison, MS, and Statewide via Telehealth
What is strategic mental health care and how is different from other types of treatment? Firstly, and most importantly, strategic care involves goals. Too often, our patients report having received counseling that was hospitable and warm but offered little direction, lacked a strategy, and never seemed to have an end date. We want to graduate you from therapy, so that at best, you only need checkups, not weekly maintenance.
Why Psychotherapy Must Involve More Than Processing the Issue
Secondly, strategic therapy follows a basic sequence, one that follows a tested course of steps to get you back on your feet and coping well.
- Build rapport by strengthening the relationship. We foster trust by showing our clients that not only are they safe to be themselves at our clinic, but that they can trust us to guide them to a place of improved functioning, adaptability, and peace.
- Reduce the frequency and intensity of immediate symptoms. We provide tools and homework to practice these new skills in order to regain a sense of control. The goal is to put out the fires and reduce the amount of immediate chaos in our clients' lives, emotions, bodies, and thinking.
- Figure out how we got here. This is an essential step, one that unfortunately often goes overlooked. This leads to redundant conversations, recurring problems, and a lack of sustained progress. By leading our patients through a systematic course of intentional conversations about their story, we are able to help reveal when compulsive coping strategies were learned in our pasts, strategies which may have at one point been adaptive, but now are leading to ineffective coping in the present.
"If we don't know, understand, and accept our stories, then our stories will live us."
- Byron Kehler, MA, trauma expert and creator of Story Informed Trauma Therapy
Why Therapy Can be an Effective Treatment for Mental Health Problems
Thousands of published studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of psychotherapy in treating mental health difficulties. However, not all therapies are equally effective when treating the same issues. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and its specialized form, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), for example, is demonstrated to be highly effective in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, Dialectical Behavior therapy (DBT), specifically in the form of group therapy, is perhaps the most effective treatment for borderline personality disorder. As a client, it can be confusing trying to understand the differences between the various mental health problems and the multitude of different therapeutic approaches. That's why you need a guide, and that's where we come in to help.
As licensed therapists and psychologists, we've trained specifically to understand why you're having the problems you're experiencing, and offer the best strategy for resolving those issues. All of our mental health issues are multi-causal (having more than one causal factor) and multi-maintained (having more than one thing which causes them to continue). Our goal is to help you not just understand why these things are happening that brought you into our office, but also how to change to make things better.
Why Therapy With a Human Being is More Effective Than Chatting with Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The reality is, most mental health interventions are not complicated. Usually, people know what they need to do, or at least have received good advice on how to fix their problem. Knowing what to do, and actually doing it, is what often separates those who continue to struggle and those who improve.
As an example, image you were once bit by a dog, and since then have avoided dogs due to the panic and trauma responses you now experience. This need to avoid dogs has created a fair amount of issues in your life. You can't go to friends' houses who have dogs. You avoid going on jogs or walks because you're afraid you'll see a canine. You might even lose your cool and yell at a loved one who forgot about your issue and surprised you with their new puppy. Despite how overwhelming this might be, or how much this has affected your life, the treatment is rather uncomplicated; you need to expose yourself to dogs who won't bite you for long enough that you're limbic system and brain stem (aka "lizard brain", the part of your mind designed to keep you safe) can relearn that all dogs are not dangerous. However, for that scenario to happen, people usually benefit greatly from having a trusted person walk along side them, step by step, as they first imagine petting a dog, then sitting in the car outside a pound, then sitting in the lobby, then maybe walking amongst the cages, then sitting with some puppies, then perhaps sitting in a room with a docile, large dog, until eventually they have recalibrated to the anxiety provoking stimulus, aka dogs.
AI can't hold your hand or pray with you or sacrifice it's time and care for you. It can maybe make simulations of those things. But our minds, bodies, souls, and spirits are designed to be interdependent with other living beings that can exist in relationships of mutual self-sacrifice. Our nervous systems know the difference between being supported by superficial emotion or by another living being that is feeling the same things we are feeling, whether they be joy or grief. In order to get better, you need a guide who is willing to not just point you on which path to take, but one who is willing to hike up the mountain with you, too. Because most of our wounds are relational, our healing must be relational as well.
Your Simple 3-Step Plan for Lasting Healing
How to Get Started:
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Start Feeling Better
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Insurances We Accept and Pay Structure
We work with these major insurance companies, which often provide coverage for mental health. Contact us to inquire about your particular plan and coverage, and we can help in determining what your out of pocket costs will be.
We also take HSA and FSA cards.
For individual psychotherapy on a self-pay rate, our therapists start at $190/per session. We work on a sliding-scale basis and are happy to discuss a lowered fee on an as-needed basis.
Your Mississippi Experts in Multi-Disciplinary Mental Health Care
Start Feeling Better. Get a plan and solutions to improve your mental health. If you've come to this site, you're likely feeling stuck on your mental health journey. You're not alone and you CAN get better. We can help.
Therapy, psychological testing, medication management, and neurofeedback training. We are your all-in-one mental health clinic in Madison, Mississippi and statewide via telehealth.
Challenges We Can Help With
Emotional Struggles
Anxiety
Depression
Stress
Burnout
Relational Challenges
Boundaries
Codependency
Relationship problems
Life & Loss
Grief
Trauma
Spiritually related issues
Identity & Mental Health
Bipolar
Borderline personality disorder
Severe psychopathology
Addiction