Assessment Sessions
During assessment sessions clinical staff will use standardized assessment measures to determine the severity of your symptoms and this allow us to track treatment progress. The assessment sessions will occur at the beginning and end of your treatment, as well as intermittently during your treatment.
Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics (CBIT)
These sessions will utilize a highly structured therapy in which you are guided to identify tics and the urges that precede the tic response; from there, you will be taught competing responses to be used when noticing the urge or the tic. The competing response is a specific behavior or movement that makes the tic more difficult to accomplish. The goal is to reduce not only the frequency, duration, and severity of tics and increase the ability to navigate through them if they do occur.
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Sessions
These sessions will be provided individually as well as during psychotherapy groups. These sessions are intended to assist you in confronting your personally anxiety arousing situations in a gradual manner. You will be asked to create an exposure hierarchy of situations that trigger anxiety and then be asked to face those situations while reducing “safety” or “avoidant” behaviors.
Group Sessions
You will take part in group sessions that will incorporate psycho-education about the principles of treatment based on CBT, ERP, DBT, ACT skills and provide opportunities to practice these skills in vivo. Participation in group sessions will also allow for the exchange of experiences with other patients.
Parent Training Sessions
These sessions will focus on psychoeducation, reducing avoidance, increasing emotional awareness, increasing interpersonal effectiveness and teamwork among caregivers, and developing an understanding of how to support you in utilizing the skills learned in therapy to facilitate generalization.
Behavior Therapy Sessions
These sessions will focus on utilizing the principles of behavior analysis and executive functioning to identify and address socially significant behaviors. Emphasis will be placed on the direct instruction of skills and strategies to reduce undesired behaviors and increase more desired, positive behaviors. You will acquire skills to improve quality of life and better regulate emotions and behaviors.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Sessions
These sessions will be provided individually as well as during psychotherapy groups. These sessions will be used to you with psycho-education about emotional regulation difficulties and other problematic behaviors that you may reports. Using DBT you will learn skills to increase awareness of emotions while utilizing more effective and safe methods of emotional control. You will be taught skills that will provide support in the enrichment of a routine and definition of values and goals in life.
Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy Sessions
Equine therapy uses interactions with horses to facilitate practicing nonverbal communication and coping with challenges just as they occur. Understanding how to manage an animal the size of a horse can also be a huge confidence builder! While research on equine therapy’s efficacy in anxiety disorders and OCD specifically is lacking, we offer this modality in the hope it can help participants apply emotional and behavioral skills they are learning in treatment in a different situation, as well as simply for the sake of a potentially life-expanding experience.
Individual Therapy Sessions
These sessions offer an opportunity to collaborate with your clinician(s) in a collaborative therapeutic relationship to achieve desired personal goals within specified timeframes. Treatment is conducted utilizing the principles and techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)..
Review of Care Session
This session will be conducted with you and your parents/loved ones during the second to last week of this treatment phase to review progress and discuss needs and goals for future care.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Sessions
These sessions will be provided individually as well as during psychotherapy groups. CBT is used to provide you with psychoeducation about your diagnosis, your identified problems, as well as the use of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), for those conditions. You will be taught skills that will support enrichment of your routine and defining values and goals in life. Among the various skills that will be practiced are behavioral activation, mindfulness, identification of values driven behavior, thought defusion, identification of triggers, and selection of more adaptive responses.
Dietary Counseling Sessions
The first session will include an overall assessment of your history related to nutrition, including height and weight, history of weight trends, medical issues, and eating behaviors. In the sessions that follow, the dietitian will develop goals to focus on during treatment, as well as address your current nutritional status and keep track of goal achievement
Family Sessions
The purpose of these sessions is for family members to increase cohesion and positive communication that are likely to improve resilience and reduce the continuation of problem behaviors. Family therapy will also help facilitate long term planning to reduce the impact of problem behaviors as much as possible.
Introductory Session
Introductory session with you and parents on the first day to present the plan for treatment, introduce you to the NBI philosophy, introduce/review the biopsychosocial model of illness and basic cognitive behavioral principles of intervention.