DEPRESSION
Our approach to depression is rooted in the idea that human beings need meaning in their lives just as much as they need food, air, or love. When our lives are rich in meaning, temporary cases of the blues don’t make us sink into depression or despair.
If you are experiencing depression, our approach can help you regain meaning in your life. We’ll guide you to discovering how, through your actions, you can build a life worth living, a life of vitality and motivation that can weather the inevitable downturns and tougher times.
Behavioral and cognitive therapies, of which Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as practiced at the CPC, are at least as effective as antidepressants in the fight against mild to moderate depression (that is to say the vast majority of depressions). Plus psychotherapy has no side effects, such as decreased sexual desire, or risk of addiction.
If you wish, and with the support of your doctor, we can also assist you in reducing and stopping antidepressants.
ANXIETY
Anxiety can take many forms: fear of speaking in public, fear of certain places or situations, fear of being judged, fear of being rejected or abandoned, fear of anxiety or panic attacks, fear of dying, fear of illness, fear of impending societal or ecological collapse, or unstoppable worries about oneself, loved ones or the future.
Anxiety can take control of our lives, make them shrink, and gradually drain them meaning. Paradoxically, the more we try to control anxiety, the more anxiety controls us. Yet, we are not doomed to stay locked in a hopeless fight in which anxiety always wins.
At the CPC, we offer an innovative and effective approach to treating anxiety. We help you contact the costs of managing your anxiety and identify what it has stopped you from doing. Next, we show you how to approach your anxiety differently so as to reduce its importance in your life and go back to doing the things that matter most to you.
Our goal is to give you concrete tools that will allow you to take back control of your life. We will teach you how to increase your resilience to anxiety so that it is no longer your enemy.
OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER
OCD can ruin lives and turn folks into slaves to the imperious injunctions of their minds. Whether through fear of contamination, fear of harming others, fear of making mistakes, fear of pollution, fear of spiritual impurity, fear of a particular sexual orientation, etc., OCD can force people to engage in compulsive actions or thinking, or to avoid certain people and situations. In some cases, OCD can be crippling and corner folks into narrow and meaningless lives.
We can help. Benjamin Schoendorff has conducted research on the treatment of OCD. He offers a validated approach. It can help you not only reduce your compulsions but also to help your life regain meaning. By connecting to your deepest values and behaving like the person you want to be, you will learn to free yourself from the tyranny of obsessions. A deep process of personal liberation.
Benjamin Schoendorff is preparing a professional manual for treating OCD.
EATING DISORDERS
Can’t think of anything other than food? Do you have trouble controlling yourself when it comes to food? If so, you may suffer from an eating disorder. Anorexia, bulimia, binge eating–eating disorders can take various forms and vary in severity. In some cases, they can be life-threatening.
People with eating disorders often have a rigid relationship with their thoughts about eating and a difficult relationship with their emotions. They may seek to self-soothe by eating or, conversely, by not eating.
Our approach can help you make peace with your emotions and build more flexibility in your approach to eating and its meaning. Our goal? To allow you to nurture a more peaceful relationship with your inner world and your personal and body image. Our approach can help you build the life you want in a way that will work for the long term. By focusing on your deepest values, we’ll help you identify what would matter most to you if you weren’t a slave to your eating and food concerns. In this way, you’ll embark on a path of personal liberation and realization of your deepest longings and aspirations.
POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS
Trauma, whether old or more recent, can impact our lives so greatly that it can feel as though we are living a borrowed life or even outside of our life. In some cases, the fear and the impact of trauma memories coming back can be so great as to effectively shut lives down. Some experiences and events are so painful that they can permanently undermine our sense of security, our beliefs about life, and our confidence in ourselves and others.
When trauma significantly impacts people’s lives, post-traumatic stress disorder can develop and have devastating consequences on everyday functioning. Painful and disorienting memories might besiege people on a daily basis or sit in ambush, ready to pounce on. All areas of life can be impacted. Close relationships often suffer, as does one’s ability to fully engage in one’s work and other important activities. It can become difficult to enjoy the good times in life and even harder to engage in self-care
If you think you may suffer from post-traumatic stress, we can help you cope better with traumatic memories so that they no longer limit your life nor take center stage in it.
By reaching down to your deepest values and helping you cultivate more kindness and compassion towards yourself and your pain, you will learn how to once again expand your life and find deep and lasting meaning and motivation. In short, you’ll build a life that is no longer defined by trauma.
CHRONIC PAIN
When pain comes to stay, it can feel like ball and chain that you drag everywhere you go. Such constant pain can be so hard that it feels like life has stopped. Everything becomes painful, even the things you love doing, . When that happens, it’s, of course, okay to limit your activities. But if you reduce drastically your activities, life shrinks and drains of meaning.
Struggling with pain on a daily basis is exhausting, to the point that even rest provides little relief.
We can help you regain a more meaningful life with your pain and in fact ACT is the best validated psychotherapeutic approach for all forms of chronic pain.
Of course, psychotherapy alone cannot make the pain disappear, as its causes are often physical or neuropathic. On the other hand, we can help you find ways to be with your pain in ways that could significantly reduce discomfort. We can also show you how to deal with your difficult thoughts about pain in a different way so that they don’t torment you so cruelly. These new skills will allow you to re-engage in a life that is once more rich in vitality and meaning.
SELF-ESTEEM AND BODY IMAGE
The cult of performance and the tyranny of perfect photoshopped bodies that fill our screens can make us prisoners of low self-esteem and make us hate our bodies.
Our approach to self-esteem and body image issues is different. Rather than seeking to boost your self-esteem and change your thoughts about your looks, we invite you on a path of self-care and reconciliation. Trying to convince yourself that you’re don’t look that bad or that ugly is rarely effective in the long run. Paradoxically, it can feed comparisons with the imagined (or photoshopped) perfection of others. We rarely come out of these comparisons on top and, in the long term, always lose.
Cultivating self-compassion and kindness allows us to receive with more distance the inevitable comparisons our minds produce. By learning to become your best friend, you will lay the foundations of a more stable and deeper sense of self-esteem and a peaceful relationship with your body. This path of deep emotional reconciliation will allow you to develop the lasting motivation to initiate the changes that will allow you to build the life you want to live.
TICS AND HABIT DISORDERS
Biting your nails, picking your skin or scabs, pulling your hair, making involuntary gestures (muscle twitching). It is rarely talked about, but many people suffer from habit disorders.
These can range from a simple habit that is a little disturbing (biting your nails or playing with your hair) to significant suffering. It can be extremely difficult to control such habits or involuntary muscle movements such as bodily or vocal tics. In the case of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, this can result in long series of movements and vocalizations that are extremely disturbing for sufferers and for those around them.
Recent research suggests that these disorders come from excessive levels of muscular tension. The good news is we can learn to lower our base levels of tension. Nail biting, hair pulling, or engaging in a muscular or vocal tic can temporarily reduce tension. However, the underlying tension remains, and with it the urge to re-engage in the problematic behavior. By learning to lower your base level of muscular tension, you can learn to bring tics and problematic habits under control.
Benjamin Schoendorff has co-authored a book on the treatment of these disorders.
OUR COMMITMENT TO EFFECTIVENESS
The CPC is a part of the ACORN collaboration which brings together more than 15,000 mental and behavioral health professionals from around the world. The 11 questions (plus 4 therapeutic alliance questions) of the ACORN questionnaire allow us to measure the effectiveness of your therapy and to monitor your progress as closely as possible. Research suggests that using the ACORN system makes therapists more effective.
YOU ARE THE HEART OF OUR WORK
We understand that your well-being is not just a matter of science and that human flourishing cannot be reduced to numbers or the absence of symptoms. Our ability to face our problems and life difficulties goes to the root of who we are as human beings. This is why we offer you an approach that goes to the heart of what it is to be human: our individual circumstances, our most deeply held values and yearnings, and our existential and spiritual choices.
COUPLES THERAPY AND RELATIONSHIP COACHING
The human brain is wired for connection. We all yearn to connect and feel attached to loved ones.
Our need for attachment makes us vulnerable and can cause us both great joys and great pain. Trying to avoid that pain or our sense of vulnerability can lead us to take actions that activate the vulnerabilities of our loved ones. This is how we can get stuck and our closest relationships become the most painful.
Intimacy, the ability to safely connect and share with our loved ones, forms the basis of our most valuable and fulfilling relationships. Knowing how to create and nurture this bond is essential for rich and satisfying intimate relationships. Nurturing intimacy involves self-care, loving-kindness for our partners, and the ability to set and maintain healthy boundaries.
If we do not tend to our intimate relationships, they can whither and lose depth and vitality. This can lead to infidelity, gradual estrangement, and turn once-loving partners into virtual strangers.
We believe that love is the most important thing in life and we can help you improve your relationships and create and nurture the relationships you most deeply yearn for. We offer relationship coaching and therapy services for couples of all sexual orientations and for people who want to learn how to create and maintain healthy and fulfilling relationships.
PARENTAL COACHING
For many of us, nothing is more important than our role as parents. But can we know what will best help our children become fully themselves? How can we help our young (and not so young) ones progress towards more freedom, more responsibility, more autonomy, more kindness, love, and personal fulfillment? These are the questions that drive us.
We have distilled the best of the extent the research on these questions and offer you effective parenting coaching services that will help you improve your relationship with your children of all ages, promote their social integration (with their friends and at school), and motivate them to participate in group activities and household tasks. Above all, you will help your children learn how to better face up to their difficult thoughts and emotions so that they no longer overwhelm them and so that they don’t push them toward behaviors and relationships that are harmful to their healthy development.
We have developed a set of practices that are easily to impart and that parents can quickly apply. These techniques are based on positive reinforcement (no more punishments and power struggles!), choice, autonomy and responsibility training, emotional coaching, and communication skills that help parents move from the role of gatekeepers (who enforce rules) to guide (who authoritatively and lovingly guide their children through the jungle of life).
We are here to help you become the parent you want to be and build a deep, strong, and genuine relationship with your children.
EXISTENTIAL COACHING
What is the meaning of life? Ever since humans received the double-edged gift of intelligence, the question has hung over our existence. At times, it can become so urgent that life becomes meaningless until we can answer it.
This question is normal. We are as thirsty for meaning as we are for water. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a values-based approach because our values are what give our lives meaning. Our values are our most intimate and precious yearnings. Mental suffering comes when we disregard our values. When our way of life or our actions violate our values, we can suffer greatly, even if ou suffering does not fit into traditional diagnostic categories.
We can help you better identify your values and, most importantly, learn how to put them into action here and now. One of the best-kept existential secrets is that questions about the meaning of life are answered step by step, action after action. The actions that embody our values irrigate our life and enrich it with meaning.
We can support you concretely, without BS, so as to help you answer the deepest questions and create a life deeply rich in meaning that you can fully inhabit.
STRESS AND BURNOUT
Our nervous system is not adapted to the modern world. Our screens bombard us day and night with bad news and solicitations. Throughout the day, problems accumulate, and, with them, so does stress.
Stress can make you live in a state of constant tension that can affect all areas of your life, jeopardize your work/family balance, and lead to burnout.
We can show you how to manage your stress differently. By learning to notice the state of your body and your mind you are in at any given moment, you can learn to release tension and get unhooked from the difficulties and pressing concerns of the moment. Through mindfulness, you will learn to deal with stressors differently while keeping in mind what really matters to you.
This way, you will be better able to cope without getting sucked into a spiral of stress and burnout. You will learn how to stay even-keeled through storms, drop anchor when needed, and better manage your energy so you can better face stressors while building the more balanced life you want to live.
BROADENING YOUR PERSPECTIVE
Your problems cloud your horizon. Regain a big picture perspective.
LEARN HOW TO NOT GET HOOKED
Identify how thoughts and emotions can hook you and learn how to stop biting.
ENGAGE IN SELF-CARE
Learn how to nurture a deeper kindness toward yourself and your struggles.
GET UNSTUCK
Identify what keeps you stuck in a rut and learn how to get unstuck.
DON'T LET OBSTACLES STOP YOU ANYMORE
Learn how to behave like the person you want to be, even in the most difficult situations.
BECOMINGYOUR BEST FRIEND
Learn how to always be there for yourself and be your strongest ally.