Services

Choosing Joy provides focused, powerful help for depression, anxiety, trauma, addictions, and troubled relationships.  Our preferred approach is straightforward, supportive, and collaborative.  We strive to honor you, to work closely alongside you, and to provide needed guidance throughout the therapy process.  Following are some principles which guide our work: 

1. While biology has an important influence, our emotions are especially influenced by meaning and relationships and deep-seated core beliefs about ourselves and our world.  Our emotions are not merely the manifestation of biological processes or “chemical imbalances.”   
2. Mere symptom management is not healing. True healing involves also moving away from that which breeds sickness and toward that which promotes health and happiness.
3. A person is not optimally treated through accurate identification only of the primary diagnosis or condition, but through an approach that then addresses those concerns in the context of the client as a whole person, including interpersonal, biological, psychological, and spiritual factors. 
4. Rather than being generally irrelevant or a source of mental illness, spirituality or  personal religious faith can be, for those so inclined, a vitally important resource to aid in the healing and growing process. 
5. In therapy, emotional healing is the product of a team effort, with therapist as guide and client as agent. The client must be willing, one step at a time, to take the risks of becoming the prime mover in his or her own behalf.
6. A primary goal of therapy is to help the client create new, healing experiences and patterns. Hence, therapy must not only provide an emotionally supportive environment, but also a strategic, goal-oriented process.
7. The ultimate goal of therapy should be for the client to become self-sufficient and thereby complete therapy, not to continue therapy endlessly.

To help you succeed in achieving your personal goals, we focus initially on a thorough and accurate assessment.  With your input and consent we then formulate a comprehensive treatment strategy.  For Dave, specific treatment interventions are often drawn from Schema Therapy, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), guided imagery, mindfulness-based strategies, EMDR, and your personal values.  With couples and other relationships, he also utilizes Emotionally-Focused Therapy and the principles of the Arbinger Institute. 

Choosing Joy always strives to employ the most natural and cost-effective clinical interventions possible, though we support the use of medications when necessary. 

Regardless of the methods used, our ultimate objective is to help you truly revive and heal your spirit and your relationships.  Such healing is not achieved without hard work on your part. But, as many individuals can attest, it is well worth it, as your efforts will be rewarded throughout your life! 

Dave currently offers individual, couple, and family therapies, all available in 60 or 90 minute sessions. 

Please call us at 801.836.8679 to schedule your first appointment, or to arrange a free 20-minute consultation.