Services

Dr. Handy offers individual therapy, focused intensive treatment, and DBT skills training. The format and intensity of treatment are tailored to each client’s needs and goals. Learn more about her approach to treatment below.

Cognitive behavioral therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) examines the relationships between thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and behavior. It helps identify patterns that contribute to distress and provides a structured way to change them.

Often, meaningful change comes from what people do: approaching a situation they have been avoiding, challenging a biased or unhelpful thought, or allowing uncertainty to remain unresolved. Through these experiences, people learn how thoughts, emotions, and behaviors reinforce one another—and how to interrupt patterns that keep them stuck.

Treatment is collaborative and guided by each client's goals. Sessions typically include identifying priorities, developing a shared understanding of the problem, practicing strategies, and reviewing progress over time. Between-session practice helps translate what happens in therapy into everyday life.

Exposure-based treatment

Avoidance is an understandable response to fear and uncertainty. It can also keep anxiety going by limiting opportunities to learn that a feared situation, thought, or sensation can be approached without relying on protective behaviors.

Exposure-based treatments help people gradually approach what they fear rather than continuing to organize their lives around avoiding it. Depending on the concern, this may involve entering a feared situation, allowing an unwanted thought to be present without trying to neutralize it, or facing a reminder of a traumatic experience in a structured therapeutic setting.

The specific approach depends on the problem being treated. Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is a well-established treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Prolonged exposure is an evidence-based treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Other exposure-based approaches can help with anxiety disorders and phobias.

The purpose of exposure is not to force someone into overwhelming situations or to guarantee that anxiety will disappear. It is to help people change their relationship with fear, reduce reliance on avoidance and other behaviors that maintain distress, and develop greater confidence in their ability to handle difficult experiences.

Skills for managing intense emotions

Some difficulties require additional strategies for responding to intense emotions, tolerating distress, and navigating challenging situations. Drawing on principles from dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), treatment may incorporate mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness skills.

These strategies help people recognize emotional responses without reacting automatically, make more deliberate choices, and navigate difficult moments more effectively. They can complement CBT and exposure-based work when appropriate to a client's needs and goals.