The things Dr. Rhoton asked me to do at the time seemed very strange, they were weird compared to my prior counseling experience, but they seemed to also fit me.  Bob asked me to give up sleep for a night or two, and to go to bed and set a timer for every 15 minutes to make sure I didn’t accidentally fall asleep. Then of course I did fall asleep and slept for 4 hours, which was the longest stretch of sleep I had at one time for about two years.  I remember that he joked with me about being so rebellious that I was going to sleep no matter what he and I agreed to and he asked me to promise not to sleep more than 5 hours.  I remember how shocked I was at the end of a month when I was sleeping 6 or 61/2 hours a night and feeling rested.

some of the other things that was happening was I was feeling more patient with my nephew, more relaxed at work and more confident in managing myself.  I was actually having fun coming to therapy, which I thought was odd, I had never had fun in therapy before, therapy always seemed like a serious business, kind of like going to church. That just wasn’t what was happening, I looked forward to getting there, and seeing what was going to happen.

I worked with Dr. Rhoton for a period of 5 months and haven’t felt the need to return to therapy since.  I have gone back to college, work regular hours and have adopted my nephew, who has become one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I am so thankful to have him with me.  I am also dating and it looks like I will be getting married next summer.  I still have days that are bad from time to time, but on the whole I am so much better than I was.  Thank you, Dr. Rhoton for your patience, your concern and the time you spent with me.  I think I understand more about Christian charity from knowing you than I have from years of church. I always tell people to see you when they share with me they are having problems.

If you are suffering from sleep deprivation, a sleeping disorder and afflicted by the symptoms of depression, anxiety, or trauma we encourage you to call our office at (480) 478-4221 or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists and learn how our trauma counselors can help you live a life free from the suffering effects of anxiety, depression, trauma and conflict. We are located in Mesa, AZ, near the Gilbert border, in the Phoenix area of Maricopa County in Arizona.

One of the most significant aspects of this book is that it presents a structured way to form and maintain positive therapeutic relationships between the client and the therapist. It shows a frank and straightforward way to be respectful and help the client find the strengths and abilities to navigate problems and build a future of positive possibilities.

I’m using geography as the metaphor of the problem at hand. If you think about geography you want to know about the latitude and longitude, the weather, what kind of flora is growing there, who lives there and you want to know the basics of what is going on in that geographic region.

If you’re having anxiety we might say that that is a “desert” problem for you and your geography is like a desert. Another person might have anxiety that is an “arctic” problem.

One of the things that often times happens is that people start therapy too soon and they try to apply polar bear, penguin intervention to a desert problem.

My goal is to make sure that I understand the geography of your situation before we ever start to intervene in it.

The better we can come to an understanding for the geography before we begin treatment, the faster and more efficient therapy is for most people and it actually ends up saving the patient time and money and we can have efforts that are really focused on what we need to accomplish.

To learn more about problem geography we encourage you to call our office at (480) 478-4221 or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists and learn how our trauma counselors can help you live a life free from the suffering effects of anxiety, depression, trauma and conflict. We are located in Mesa, AZ.

He was an engineer; he talked very logic-based, very reason-based. She was all emotion and everything was an emotional thing for her. He was really attracted to that in the beginning and she was attracted to him because he was organized and  logical guy.

Eight years later, they’re no longer attracted to each other. So they talked about what they felt like they needed to do which was work on their ability to communicate with each other and hear each other in the language that they used.

So I took their idea of what they felt they needed to do and built an intervention around it. The intervention was that over the next two weeks to pick one topic each time they had a discussion, go some place where they could be alone, take a bag of marshmallows, divide it in half, and start talking about the problem at hand.

Every time the engineer slipped into “engineer talk”  she was to hit him with one of these marshmallows. And every time she slipped into emotional language he was to hit her with a marshmallow.

It sounds kind of silly but when they came back in for the following session they had done the assignment five or six times in a two week period of time, they told me that they could never get through the task, “we just start laughing, and it’s just too funny”.

“After four or five hits with the marshmallow we get to laughing and start talking about other things and now we’re at the point where if one of us or the other one catches the other kind of not comprehending the other we say oh is it time for marshmallows. And that brings it right around”.

After four sessions they were done. They never needed to come back for another session.

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If you are experiencing problems in your marriage or relationship and feel that couple’s therapy may help your marriage or relationship, we encourage you to call our office or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our psychotherapists, and learn how our relationship and marriage counselors can help resolve the conflict in your life. We are located in Mesa, AZ.

Years later, as an adult, even though she was living in Arizona and her family is all back east she equated the relationship so that food really meant being connected to family and she was kind of feeling the loss of her family every time she deprived herself of food. I really didn’t need to do any therapy. Upon realizing why she overate she said to me at the end that second session “well that’s kind of silly”. And I told her, no that’s just how you constructed it. So she responded, “Oh…well… I don’t want to do that anymore”. She had her moment of realization and she was done. End of therapy.

I got most of the initial groundwork out of the initial consultation and then I looked for patterns in the first session and by the second session she had really clarified what all of this meant to her, looked at it and said “I don’t have to keep doing that. That’s not helping me”. She was a successful case after that.

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If you relate to Tina’s story, if you suffer from depression due being overweight, if you have an eating disorder or if you are afflicted by the symptoms of trauma we encourage you to call our office or schedule a complementary thirty minute consultation with one of our therapists at Psychological Health and Wellness, meet with one of our dedicated practitioners and learn how our trauma counselors can help you live a life free from the suffering effects of anxiety, depression and trauma. We are located in Mesa, AZ.

How do you deal with a new patient that says I only can afford five or six sessions can you help me and fix me in five or six sessions?

My answer generally is that it depends upon how much energy that you have. How much energy do you have to put into this? We only have so much energy. You may not have enough energy to get it done in five or six sessions but we can certainly make a really good impact in that time. But it might take 7 to 10 sessions over a period of several months.

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Typically I do a lot of predicting for people. Even coming out of the consultation, generally have a pretty good idea of what the time lines are going to be and I’ll say to the patient, if you have the energy to put into this we can probably handle this treatment between 5 to 6 sessions or 7 to 10 sessions.

The reason why I ask how much energy you have is that I am going to assign you things to do outside of our sessions. I generally do not see people every week. This little hour we spend together every couple of weeks isn’t enough to help create the change you need as a patient. But the things we want to work on outside of session, if you have the energy to do those assignments we can make a real improvement in a short period of time.