Individual Therapy

Pattern-Focused, Philosophically-Grounded Treatment

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Table of Contents

Overview

Individual therapy at ShieldMee is designed for people who need more than surface-level support. I specialize in treatment-resistant cases — clients who have tried traditional therapy without lasting transformation, or high-functioning professionals who need an approach that matches their intellectual sophistication.

My approach integrates Adlerian psychology, Socratic questioning (elenchus method), person-centered principles, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to create strategic disruption in the narratives keeping you stuck.

What to Expect

  • Frequency: Most clients meet once per week; twice per week recommended for higher acuity cases requiring intensive support
  • 50-minute sessions via secure telehealth platform
  • Person-centered foundation with active, strategic questioning
  • Pattern recognition and theme identification across sessions
  • Homework assignments and behavioral experiments
  • Realistic timeline: Most clients see meaningful progress within 12 sessions

Best For

  • Executives facing burnout or career transitions
  • Medical professionals managing secondary trauma
  • Attorneys dealing with high-stress caseloads
  • Individuals who have tried therapy before without lasting change
  • Treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, or relational patterns
  • High-functioning people who need intellectual engagement, not just validation

Investment

  • Individual Therapy: $158 per session
  • Insurance accepted through Headway. Private pay available through SimplePractice.
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The Socratic Method: Why Questions Matter More Than Answers

Over 2,400 years ago, Socrates walked the streets of Athens asking questions that exposed contradictions in how people thought about truth, virtue, and knowledge. He didn’t lecture or give advice. Instead, through careful questioning — a method called elenchus — he helped people discover their own blind spots by recognizing inconsistencies in their own reasoning.

How Elenchus Works in Modern Therapy

The elenchus method uses strategic questioning to reveal the contradictions between what you say you believe and how you actually live. It’s not about catching you in lies — it’s about helping you see where your conscious beliefs and unconscious patterns are misaligned.

For example:

  • You say you value honesty, but you avoid difficult conversations
  • You claim to want connection, but you push people away when they get close
  • You believe you deserve respect, but you accept treatment that violates your boundaries

The Power of Questions

When I ask the right questions, your narrative begins to break down. Not because I’m telling you you’re wrong, but because you’re recognizing your own contradictions. Once you see the inconsistency clearly, you can’t unsee it. That’s when behavioral activation happens naturally — you start taking action because the old story no longer holds you in place.

As Socrates understood, wisdom begins when you stop pretending to know what you don’t actually know. My job is to ask the questions that help you get honest with yourself about what’s really driving your behavior.

Spitting in the Soup: Making the Unconscious Conscious

Alfred Adler, founder of Individual Psychology, introduced a concept called “spitting in the soup” — and no, it’s not about being cruel or harsh. It’s about making the unconscious payoffs of your behavior so conscious that the behavior loses its appeal.

Here’s the idea: We all engage in behaviors that serve hidden purposes. Maybe your anxiety keeps you from taking risks that might lead to failure. Maybe your anger creates distance so you don’t have to be vulnerable. Maybe your perfectionism protects you from criticism. These behaviors have secondary gains — unconscious benefits that keep them in place.

How “Spitting in the Soup” Works

When I identify the hidden payoff of your maladaptive pattern and bring it into your conscious awareness, it’s like watching someone spit in your soup. You can still eat the soup if you want — but it’s a lot less appealing now that you know what’s in it.

Example

  • Client: “I can’t stop procrastinating on this project.”
  • Therapist (Adlerian intervention): “As long as you procrastinate, you never have to find out if your best effort is good enough. The fantasy of your potential stays intact.”

Once you see that your procrastination is protecting you from facing the limits of your ability, procrastination becomes harder to justify. The unconscious benefit — preserving your self-image — is now conscious. The soup has been ruined.

The Goal

Adlerian therapy isn’t about making you feel better in the short term. It’s about making your self-defeating patterns so transparent that you can’t sustain them anymore. When the unconscious becomes conscious, choice becomes possible.

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Unconditional Positive Regard Meets Cognitive Restructuring

Carl Rogers believed that people have an innate capacity for growth when provided with the right therapeutic conditions: unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence (therapist authenticity). Rogers wasn’t interested in diagnosing, fixing, or directing clients. He trusted that if you felt genuinely understood and accepted, you would naturally move toward psychological health.

The Person-Centered Foundation

I start from a Rogerian foundation because you are the expert on your own life. My role is not to impose solutions or tell you how to live. It’s to create a space where you feel safe enough to explore the parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding — the contradictions, the shame, the patterns you don’t want to admit.

Where CBT Comes In

But person-centered therapy alone doesn’t always create change — especially for intelligent, high-functioning people who can spend years in therapy feeling understood without ever transforming their behavior. That’s where Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) becomes essential.

CBT operates on a simple premise: Thoughts → Feelings → Behaviors. Your interpretation of events — not the events themselves — determines your emotional and behavioral response. If you can identify and challenge distorted thinking patterns, you can change how you feel and what you do.

The Integration

In practice, this means I provide Rogerian acceptance while also actively challenging cognitive distortions. I won’t judge you, but I will point out when your thoughts don’t match reality. I’ll offer unconditional positive regard for you as a person while refusing to validate self-destructive narratives.

Common Cognitive Distortions We Address

  • All-or-nothing thinking: “If I’m not perfect, I’m a failure.”
  • Catastrophizing: “If this goes wrong, my life is over.”
  • Mind reading: “I know they think I’m incompetent.”
  • Emotional reasoning: “I feel worthless, therefore I am worthless.”
  • Should statements: “I should be further along by now.”

The Result

You get the safety of being fully accepted while also getting the intellectual rigor of having your thinking challenged. It’s the balance between validation and confrontation — the sweet spot where real change happens.

Themes as Therapeutic Targets

Most therapy focuses on addressing individual problems: “I’m anxious about this presentation,” “I’m angry at my partner,” “I’m stuck in my career.” But individual problems are usually symptoms of deeper thematic patterns that repeat across different areas of your life.

What Are Thematic Patterns?

Thematic patterns are the recurring psychological strategies you use to navigate the world. They show up in your relationships, your work, your self-talk, and your decision-making. Once you see the pattern, you start recognizing it everywhere.

Common Patterns I Target

1. The Competence-Worthiness Link

  • Pattern: “I am only valuable when I’m performing at an exceptional level.”
  • Shows up in: Workaholism, perfectionism, burnout, fear of mediocrity
  • Intervention: Separating inherent worth from achievement

2. The Vulnerability-Danger Association

  • Pattern: “If people see my weaknesses, they will use them against me.”
  • Shows up in: Emotional guardedness, difficulty trusting, isolation
  • Intervention: Testing vulnerability in controlled doses

3. The Control-Safety Equation

  • Pattern: “I need to control outcomes to feel safe.”
  • Shows up in: Anxiety, micromanagement, difficulty delegating
  • Intervention: Exposure to uncertainty, building distress tolerance

4. The Conflict-Abandonment Fear

  • Pattern: “If I disagree or set boundaries, people will leave.”
  • Shows up in: People-pleasing, resentment, passive-aggressive behavior
  • Intervention: Practicing assertiveness, observing that relationships survive conflict

How Pattern-Focused Therapy Works

Instead of treating each issue in isolation, we identify the underlying pattern driving multiple symptoms. Once the pattern is named and understood, you start seeing it operate in real time. That metacognitive awareness — the ability to observe your own thinking — is what creates lasting change.

Why This Matters

If we only address surface-level symptoms, you’ll keep generating new problems from the same underlying pattern. But if we target the pattern itself, multiple symptoms resolve simultaneously. It’s more efficient and more durable.

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When Narratives Need to Break

Some clients come to therapy with deeply entrenched narratives — stories they’ve told themselves for so long that they’ve become psychological infrastructure. These narratives shape identity, justify behavior, and maintain the status quo.

Examples of Entrenched Narratives

  • “I’m damaged because of what happened to me, so I can’t be expected to function normally.”
  • “My intelligence means I shouldn’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else.”
  • “People have always let me down, so it’s safer to stay isolated.”
  • “I’m a victim of circumstances beyond my control.”

These narratives often contain elements of truth — but they’ve calcified into all-encompassing identities that prevent growth.

What Is Strategic Disruption?

Strategic disruption is the intentional breaking of narratives that keep clients stuck. It’s not about being harsh or invalidating suffering — it’s about refusing to reinforce stories that no longer serve the client’s wellbeing.

How It Works in Practice

When a client presents a limiting narrative, I don’t argue against it directly. Instead, I:

  1. Acknowledge the origin: “That story made sense given what you experienced.”
  2. Identify the cost: “And now that story is keeping you from having the relationships you want.”
  3. Introduce contradiction: “You say you’re damaged, but you’ve accomplished X, Y, and Z. How do you explain that?”
  4. Offer an alternative frame: “What if you’re not damaged — what if you’re someone who survived something difficult and now has a choice about what comes next?”

The Disruption

The goal is to create enough cognitive dissonance that the old narrative can’t hold. When the story breaks, there’s often discomfort — sometimes anger, sometimes grief. But in that space of narrative collapse, new possibilities emerge.

When Is This Appropriate?

Strategic disruption is not appropriate for: Clients in acute crisis, early trauma processing, or clients who haven’t established trust in the therapeutic relationship.

Strategic disruption is appropriate for: High-functioning clients who are “stuck in insight” (they understand their patterns but don’t change them), clients who use their narrative as armor against accountability, and treatment-resistant cases where validation-based approaches have failed.

The Principle

I operate from the assumption that you are more capable than your narrative suggests. My refusal to accept your limiting story is an act of respect for your potential, not a dismissal of your pain.

Yochelson & Samenow: The Criminal Personality Framework

Forensic populations — individuals involved in the criminal justice system or exhibiting antisocial behavioral patterns — require a fundamentally different therapeutic approach than traditional mental health populations. The research of Dr. Samuel Yochelson and Dr. Stanton Samenow, documented in their landmark work The Criminal Personality (1976), demonstrated that criminal behavior is driven not by external circumstances, trauma, or social disadvantage, but by thinking errors — systematic cognitive distortions that justify harmful behavior.

The Core Premise

Criminal thinking is characterized by a consistent pattern of cognitive distortions that allow the individual to: maintain a positive self-image while engaging in harmful behavior, externalize responsibility for consequences, view themselves as victims even when victimizing others, and experience excitement and superiority through rule violations.

The 52 Thinking Errors (Selected Examples)

1. The “I’m a Good Person” Error: Despite engaging in harmful behavior, the individual maintains that they are fundamentally good because they have some prosocial qualities or haven’t committed certain crimes they view as worse.

2. Victim Stance: Portraying oneself as the injured party in situations where one has caused harm. “The system is out to get me” while ignoring personal responsibility.

3. Ownership: Believing one has the right to take or control what one desires. Entitlement without reciprocal obligation.

4. Power Thrust: Deriving identity and satisfaction from dominating, intimidating, or controlling others. Chronic need to “win” in all interactions.

5. Superoptimism: Unrealistic expectations of positive outcomes despite pattern of negative consequences. “This time will be different” without behavior change.

6. Closed Channel: Refusing to consider information that contradicts desired narrative. Dismissing feedback, evidence, or alternative perspectives.

Therapeutic Approach

Working with forensic populations requires:

  1. Abandoning Traditional Empathy-Based Models: Validation of feelings without addressing thinking errors reinforces the victim stance. The goal is not to make the client feel understood but to confront distorted cognition.
  2. Systematic Confrontation of Thinking Errors: Real-time identification of cognitive distortions as they occur in session. Refusing to accept justifications, rationalizations, or externalizations.
  3. Building the “Deterrent”: Developing internal discomfort (shame, guilt, fear of consequences) that was previously absent. Teaching the client to experience psychological distress before acting, not after getting caught.
  4. Accountability Over Insight: Insight without behavior change is worthless. The measure of progress is reduced harmful behavior, not increased self-awareness.

Who Benefits from This Approach

  • Court-mandated clients
  • Individuals with antisocial personality features
  • Domestic violence offenders
  • Substance users who demonstrate manipulative patterns
  • Professionals facing disciplinary action for ethical violations
  • Anyone exhibiting chronic irresponsibility with externalization of blame

The Prognosis

Yochelson and Samenow were pessimistic about outcomes — they found that lasting change required the individual to essentially reconstruct their entire personality by replacing every thinking error with prosocial cognition. This is exhausting, unglamifying work that most criminal personalities ultimately reject.

However, for the subset of individuals who are genuinely tired of the consequences of their behavior and are willing to submit to rigorous cognitive restructuring, meaningful change is possible. The key predictor is not remorse (which is often performative) but sustained willingness to have every thought challenged.

What the Data Actually Shows About Post-Deployment Adjustment

If you’ve deployed to a combat zone, you’ve heard all the narratives: “Warriors come home broken,” “PTSD is inevitable,” “The VA is useless,” “No one who hasn’t been there can understand.” Some of this is true. Most of it is incomplete. Here’s what the research actually shows — and what it means for your treatment options.

The Base Rates (Because Numbers Matter)

According to RAND Corporation’s 2008 study of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and subsequent DOD epidemiological data:

  • Approximately 14-20% of veterans who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan meet criteria for PTSD
  • Approximately 14% meet criteria for major depression
  • Approximately 19% report experiencing a traumatic brain injury (TBI) during deployment
  • These conditions frequently co-occur (comorbidity rates around 50%)

Translation: If you deployed, you’re statistically more likely to NOT develop PTSD than to develop it. This doesn’t minimize the experience of those who do — it contextualizes risk.

Why Some Service Members Develop PTSD and Others Don’t

Protective Factors

  • Strong unit cohesion during deployment
  • Perception of mission meaningfulness
  • Post-deployment social support (family, friends, veteran community)
  • Ability to contextualize combat experiences within a larger framework
  • Prior resilience and absence of pre-deployment mental health conditions

Risk Factors

  • Multiple deployments with short dwell time
  • High combat intensity (firefights, IED exposure, witnessing casualties)
  • Military sexual trauma (MST)
  • Pre-existing mental health vulnerabilities
  • Post-deployment isolation or loss of identity
  • Legal, financial, or relationship instability after separation

The Transition Problem (What Actually Breaks People)

Here’s the dirty secret: It’s often not the combat that breaks you. It’s the transition home to a society that has no functional equivalent to military structure and purpose, responds to your service with either performative hero-worship or awkward avoidance, expects you to “translate” your skills into civilian terms that feel like a demotion, and offers jobs that feel meaningless compared to mission-critical roles you held at 22.

You went from having a clear chain of command, defined mission parameters, and tangible metrics of success to… what? Submitting resumes? Sitting in corporate meetings where people use “military precision” as a metaphor while never having actually experienced it?

The Therapeutic Approach That Actually Works

Standard trauma-focused therapy (Prolonged Exposure, CPT) has strong evidence for PTSD symptom reduction — if you engage with it. But here’s the problem: A lot of service members sit through therapy while maintaining the belief that “No one who hasn’t deployed can understand,” which is a cognitive barrier that prevents treatment engagement.

The Reframe

Your therapist doesn’t need to have deployed to treat PTSD. Your oncologist doesn’t need to have had cancer. Your physical therapist doesn’t need to have torn their ACL. Expertise in treatment doesn’t require personal experience of the condition. What it requires is: understanding the research on trauma and nervous system dysregulation, competence in evidence-based interventions, and ability to hold space for your experience without needing to make it about themselves.

What I Offer

I’m not a veteran. I’m not going to pretend I know what deployment feels like. What I know is: how avoidance maintains PTSD symptoms (trauma memory remains unprocessed), how hypervigilance is an adaptive response in-theater that becomes maladaptive stateside, how loss of unit identity creates existential drift, and how to dismantle the thinking errors that keep you stuck in anger, isolation, or substance use.

The Work

  • Exposure work (approaching the memories you’ve been avoiding)
  • Cognitive restructuring (challenging the beliefs formed in-theater that no longer serve you)
  • Behavioral activation (rebuilding a life that has purpose outside of military identity)
  • Skills training for emotional regulation (because the civilian world doesn’t give you clear ROE for managing conflict)

The Bottom Line

You have options. The VA has its limitations, but the evidence-based protocols (PE, CPT) have robust outcome data. Private-sector therapists with military cultural competence exist. You don’t have to white-knuckle it alone or self-medicate until something breaks.

And if your current approach isn’t working — if you’ve been in and out of treatment, if you’re stuck in the “no one understands” loop, if you’re using the veteran identity as armor against accountability — then maybe it’s time to try something that doesn’t let you hide behind the narrative.

Investment

  • Individual Therapy: $158 per session
  • Insurance accepted through Headway. Private pay available through SimplePractice.
  • Sessions conducted via secure telehealth throughout Florida
See If We’re a Good Fit

Further Reading from Our Blog

Explore related articles that go deeper into the topics covered in individual therapy:

For a deep dive into the research methods behind this approach, visit our Psychoeducation page.

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