Our Approach
Compassionate, Personalized Care for Lasting Healing
Core Values
This is what we’re all about.
Autonomy
At Beautifully You Counseling, care is collaborative and our goal is to put the client’s autonomy over their body first. Treatment should not be conditional, and it should not feel like a trap to do what your treatment team wants you to do. We work with our clients and their treatment team to provide care that takes into account their own specific needs and experiences while putting the clients’ values and goals for their health first.
Harm-Reduction
Through a harm reduction approach, we believe any change in the direction of your goals is worth celebrating, and small changes are great changes. Rather than approaching care through an abstinence-based model, we’re looking at making small, realistic changes over time that get you closer to your goal. We don’t believe in just healing symptoms, but teaching our clients about deeper influences such as generational trauma and systemic factors that may have influenced the development of their mental illness over time.
Size-Inclusive Care
We believe all bodies deserve treatment and support in the pursuit of health regardless of size, which includes mental health! Many experience trauma as a result of rejection and invalidation from the medical community due to body size. We provide inclusive treatment for all bodies using a Health at Every Size and trauma-informed approach and believe that compassionate, relational approaches are best.
Our Approach
There are a few things you should know about working with us:
⁕ Thoughts aren’t bad.
Hear me out. We know you’re probably thinking of 1 or 2 right now that you would call “wrong” or “bad”. But when you work from a place of curiosity and acceptance, there is so much we can learn from them! The work we do is to become more friendly and accepting of these thoughts so they don’t feel so scary, or make you feel so bad, anymore.
⁕ Our goal is body neutrality not body positivity.
Don’t get us wrong, body positivity is wonderful, but it is also REALLY HARD to achieve in our culture! If we work towards neutrality, the focus is on loving your life, not just your body.
⁕ Treatment should and will be size-inclusive.
What does that mean? All bodies, regardless of weight, shape or size, deserve treatment and support in healing their relationship with their body and food. All treatment at Beautifully You is size inclusive and HAES aligned!
⁕ You know a lot more about your body than we do.
Yeah, we have some experience and credentials- but that doesn’t make us any more of experts than you. We’re trying to figure this out, too! You might feel like your mind or body are foreign to you right now. But our goal is to get you back to feeling like the expert on yourself.
⁕ No foods are bad, and your body is not inherently wrong.
Just like bodies, food is neutral! There is no morality attached to it! All foods fit, and your body is not wrong for existing the way it does! Together, we can work on self compassion and permission to eat the foods that fuel you to live a happy life!
Techniques We Use
Three Approaches to Support Your Healing
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT is the leading evidence-based approach for treatment of Eating and Anxiety Disorders. Through CBT, we are looking at unhelpful thinking patterns and beliefs (cognitions) that inform and influence unhealthy behaviors we adopt over time. Once you are better able to understand your thoughts, you are able to make changes to behaviors that may be causing distress and unhappiness in your life.
Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP)
ERP falls under the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) umbrella. It is one of the leading therapeutic techniques for treating OCD and we love using it for Eating Disorders as well. The exposure side of this technique focuses on confronting the thoughts, images, situations, and actions that you fear and provoke anxiety. After the exposure, we are working on response prevention by challenging and resisting the urge to following through with a compulsion after the trigger occurs. The goal is to reframe how the obsession and compulsion are connected in your brain so the fear is no longer seen as a threat.
Inference-Based CBT (I-CBT)
I-CBT believes that OCD uses logical information collected from different sources to create narratives or “obsessional stories” around a fear. Overtime, the over-reliance on this information rather than your senses and touch with reality cause distrust with yourself, making it hard to know what is real and what is not. As a result, you carry out compulsions that further validate the fear and the information your OCD gathered to facilitate it. I-CBT works to give you back that confidence in yourself by breaking down reasonable doubt from obsessional doubt so you can better understand how your OCD is controlling you and slowly gain back that control.
Your Path to Healing
Therapy Session Pricing
Initial Assessment
In this first session, we’ll explore your history, challenges, and goals for therapy. This is a time to share your story, ask questions, and start building a plan that supports your healing journey.
45 min Session
After the initial session, the 45 minute options allow us to check in weekly or biweekly, working towards your goals, building skills, and getting to know you on a deeper level.
$175- $200
60 min Session
If you notice the 45 minute session cuts you off or there’s more you would like to discuss and accomplish than it allows for, the 60 minute session is a great option for you!
$200- $225