Blog - Virtual Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The Role of Hypnosis in Treating Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a common gastrointestinal disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. In addition to traditional treatments, hypnosis has emerged as a promising tool for managing IBS symptoms. This blog explores how hypnosis can alleviate symptoms, and address psychological factors associated with IBS.

Hypnosis can significantly reduce the severity and frequency of IBS symptoms, including abdominal pain, bloating, and irregular bowel movements. By providing relaxation and suggesting control over gut function, hypnosis empowers individuals to manage their symptoms effectively.

Through hypnotic suggestions, hypnosis can normalize erratic gut motility patterns, leading to improved digestion and a reduction in diarrhea or constipation.

Hypnosis equips individuals with coping techniques, empowering them to navigate the emotional challenges of living with IBS. By altering perception and response to pain and stress, hypnosis enhances emotional well-being.

Hypnosis helps identify and address psychological factors such as anxiety, depression, and past traumas that can worsen IBS symptoms. By working with a therapist, individuals achieve emotional healing and reduce the impact of psychological stressors on their digestive system.

Hypnosis complements traditional treatments for IBS by providing relaxation, regulating gut motility, and addressing psychological factors. If you have IBS and are interested in exploring hypnosis as part of your treatment plan, consider consulting with a qualified healthcare professional. One such expert in the field is Dr. Robert Heller, who can be reached at drrobertheller@gmail.com for a consultation. With the guidance of a skilled therapist like Dr. Heller, hypnosis can be a valuable tool for managing your symptoms and improving your overall well- being, allowing you to regain control over your digestive health.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy in the Treatment of Phobias

Over my 45 years of working with clients I have treated a variety of fears and phobias: public speaking, flying, test taking, heights, thunderstorms, darkness , animals, insects and crowds. One of the most useful methods I use is “systematic desensitization”.

Originally developed by Dr. Joseph Wolpe in the 1950’s, it seeks to “counter condition the fear response with the relaxation response”. The process involves creating an anxiety ladder from situations that bother the person from least to most. Next, clients are taught how to relax their body by systematically squeezing, holding and slowly releasing the tense muscles. This produces a deep state of relaxation. While in the relaxed state, they are asked to imagine the least anxiety provoking situation and hold it in their mind. If they feel anxious, they stop imagining the scene and re-engage in the relaxation response until they are calm again. They then re-imagine the upsetting scene. This process is continued until imagining the scene no longer triggers an anxiety response. Once the person can successfully imagine the entire sequence without feeling any substantial anxiety, they are ready to practice a “graduated exposure” to the situations and if anxious, apply the same relaxation response. At that point the phobia has been significantly “desensitized” and the person can more easily apply the same skills they practiced in imagery into their “real life” conditions.

In clinical practice, I often incorporate the Cognitive Behavior Therapy strategy of challenging any associated fearful thoughts and replacing them with healthier more desirable ones.

The treatment of most phobias are straight forward with a significant number of clients being able to drive their cars again, speak in public, fly on airplanes, be comfortable around dogs and dozens of other common fears so many have avoided.

Help is available virtually for those anywhere in the states of Florida or Massachusetts.

For additional information on the treatment of fears and phobias using Cognitive Behavior Therapy, contact Dr. Robert Heller at www.cognitivebehaviortherapyfl.com, e-mail drrobertheller@gmail.com or call 561 251-9768.

CBT in the Treatment of Anxiety

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is a well-known and widely effective treatment for anxiety. Hundreds of studies over the past 60 years have concluded that it is the number 1 treatment of choice for mild and moderate amounts of anxiety and useful with severe anxiety when combined with anti-anxiety medication. I have been practicing CBT for 45 years and was fortunate to learn from one of the founders of the CBT revolution Dr. Albert Ellis. He actually developed a system called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy about a year before Dr. Aaron Beck coined and popularized the approach know as cognitive behavior therapy. In my first session with clients I explain the ABC theory of Emotions and how our thoughts and beliefs largely impact our feelings and behaviors and that by changing our self-talk we can influence our moods and behaviors.

Treatment of Anxiety

Cognitive behavior Therapy emphasizes the importance of our current thoughts and beliefs rather than dwelling on the unconscious, early childhood experiences and how we have come to think the way we do. The focus is on changing the current thoughts and beliefs that negatively impact feelings and behavior and how to correct unhelpful thinking patterns and replace them with more useful ways of thinking.

An common example is the fear of public speaking. Many people are extremely anxious when speaking in front of an audience and this can negatively impact their performance. In more extreme cases individuals will avoid public speaking completely, even if it causes a failing grad or one’s ability to get promoted at work. Using an ABC analysis, A=the activity “I need to speak in front of a group”, B=the beliefs “ What if I freeze and can’t remember my speech? I will be a failure. Others will think less of me” . This leads to the emotional consequence (C)= Anxiety. Once I help the client tease out that negative beliefs associated with their anxiety producing thoughts, I help them examine and challenge some of their assumptions which are generally false or exaggerated. The client learns how to recognize and challenge or dispute their negative thoughts and replace them with healthier and more rational thoughts. With repeated practice, the negative emotion lessens and the individual can more comfortably and effectively give their speech and increase their confidence over time.

Rather than taking years, this approach can help many individuals greatly reduce or eliminate their specific fears in a matter of months.

I am now providing Cognitive Behavior Therapy for anxiety and other conditions virtually throughout the States of Florida and Massachusetts. To learn more about how CBT might be of value to you or someone you know, you can view my website at www.cognitivetherapyfl.com. E-mail at drrobertheller@gmail.com or call 561 251-9768.

CBT in the Treatment of Depression

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and the related approach of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy are popular and often effective approaches in the treatment of depression. Depression is characterized by thoughts of helplessness and hopelessness.

Treatment of Depression

Early on in my career I worked with a client who was depressed because he could not get any dates and thought he would be alone and lonely for the rest of his life. Turned out he was telling himself that if he approached a girl she would surely reject him (negatively predicting) and if that happened it would be awful (“catastrophizing”), so he largely avoided approaching women and it became a self fulfilling prophecy.

In working with him he came to understand that rejection was not an awful thing although it was disappointing but if he approached and interacted with enough women, something would eventually click. After a few sessions, he agreed to go to a dance club and ask a number of women to dance, even though he was anxious. The idea was he would get a number of rejections and practice telling himself “no big deal” and continue the process until he was less anxious. As it turned out, the first girl he asked to dance said yes and they ended up talking and dancing the entire time and they made a date for the following weekend. The idea that he was helpless was change by his proactive action and the hopelessness was changed by finding “success” in getting a date. As a result, his mood changed and he felt better about himself.

By changing thoughts and behavior, feelings change.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy teaches both emotional and practical skills to help individuals think, feel and behave more effectively.

For more information about how Cognitive Behavior Therapy might be of help to you, contact Dr.Robert Heller at 561 251-9768 or e-mail drrobertheller@gmail.com.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy in the Treatment of Anger

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) treats anger like all other emotional disorders. First ,we help the client figure out the trigger event or activity is that starts the ball rolling Next we examine the connection between what they tell themselves to become angry. Then, we discuss whether the angry feeling and related behavior is something they want to keep or change. If they want to “work” on changing, I explain some of the skills that will be taught to help them change how they think. Feel and behave.

Treatment of Anger One client of mine would frequently get upset when dining out if he was kept waiting to be seated or if a waiter would not attend to his request quickly enough. He would tend to get loud and demanding and this would often contribute to others being uncomfortable around him. He was barred from some establishments and a number of friends would no longer dine out with him. His negative beliefs centered around feeling entitlement and rigid ideas about how people in the service industry must act. His impatience was characterized by an attitude of “I want what I want when I want it and you SHOULD or MUST treat me the way I feel I deserve to be treated.” When the should or must is applied to others, it usually leads to the excessive anger towards them. When the should or must is applied to oneself, it results in self blame and even self hatred.

Once my client agreed that he didn’t want to feel as angry as he does and wanted to change his behavior, I helped him to better accept some frustration and be less bothered when others don’t live up to his standards. We helped him to consider other reasons why he might not be getting the kind of service he wanted, and what more “appropriate” options he could use to handle the situation. We then practiced through both “imagery” and “role playing” better ways to think and behave. He was also also taught skills to increase his self – awareness of when his anger is emerging so he could use skills like deep breathing and coping self talk to calm down and/or taking a time out by going to the bathroom or outside to “chill”.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for anger management can be taught to children, adolescent, adults and seniors. Progress typically occurs over a period of months rather than years , in part, because it places a strong emphasis of giving homework and other practice exercises to reinforce healthy habits.

For more information, check out www.cognitivebehaviortherapyfl.com. If you are considering treatment for yourself or others, contact Dr. Robert Heller at drrobertheller@gmail.com, or call/text 561 251-9768.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for the Treatment of Alcohol Abuse

There is no question about it. Many people drink too much alcohol and have done so for many years. While some people can “moderate” their drinking, a great many have to accept the fact that they cannot and need to stop all together and forever.

Alcohol treatment Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) provides individuals a method to understand what their triggers are for drinking, what is maintaining it and develop healthy and effective skills to eliminate from their life. Often times there are a number reasons that maintain a person’s drinking habit.

In one recent case, a client reported that she would drink at the end of the day to “relax”, but 1 drink would lead to 6 or more! She would drink in the presence of her boyfriend as a social activity. She would drink when she was bored. When at a party, she would drink to “celebrate”. When at a club, she would drink to reduce her “social anxiety”. The alcohol was threatening her potential marriage, putting her at risk for driving accidents, and had resulted in significant weight gain which impacted her self image and more!

In Cognitive Behavior Therapy, we use many strategies to help the client understand and to motivate them towards change. These methods may include motivational interviewing to enhance the desire for positive change, training in relaxation methods to reduce the physical sensations of anxiety and developing rewards to increase. Positive behaviors and punishments to decrease negative behaviors. Through the use of customized “homework assignments” clients learn how to more effectively manage urges to drink, and live more effectively when exposed to situations where alcohol is present.

Once an individual has stopped drinking, we go through a series of future oriented practice exercises, known as “relapse prevention” to strengthen their confidence and resiliency. Depending on the situation we might recommend they participate in a group like SMART Recovery or AA, involve the family for support, and in some cases, recommend an evaluation to consider whether or not the use of specific medications my be useful.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy practitioners have many tools in the toolbox to help clients free themselves from alcohol and other substance abuse problems.

For additional information or those seeking virtual counseling anywhere in Florida or Massachusetts, visit www.cognitivetherapyfl.com or contact Dr. Robert Heller at drrobertheller@gmail.com or call/text 561 251-9768.

Life Coaching

When I think of “coaching”, I think of someone with specific expertise who can teach, educate, instruct and train. A coach motivates and inspires you to work towards achieving a degree of excellence, to optimize your performance, to go from good to better to great. A coach is encouraging and supportive but is honest and points out your weaknesses and mistakes so you can increase your self-awareness over time and become more of your own coach.

My personal view of coaching is that it is skills based, whether it be to help with goal setting, staying focused, maintaining concentration, developing resources to deal with adversity, managing time and energy and related areas.

Coaching mostly addresses what is happening in the present and what you want to achieve in the future. There is far less a focus on the past and early childhood experiences. As such, individuals seeking coaching should be generally emotionally stable and high functioning, free of any acute high stress and issues of major anxiety or depression. While these issues and problems are not necessarily incompatible with life coaching, the individual should be working with or referred to a psychologist or other qualified mental health professional.

In coaching, there is considerable flexibility on the frequency and length of sessions and contacts are often conducted via phone or video calls. There is no “medical necessity” for meetings so no formal diagnosis is given and “clients” pay out of pocket with no reimbursement by insurance.

Life coaching can address many areas of a person’s life from making job related decisions, being more successful in dating strategies, setting goals and priorities, learning to balance work, play and relationships, performing better at your job, managing time better, overcoming procrastination, losing weight, staying motivated in working out and many other issues that arise across the life span.

While psychologists can be life coaches, life coaches cannot be psychologists or other mental health professionals unless they have a State license. At the present moment, ANYONE can call himself or herself a life coach and have little or no training to do so.

To see if Life Coaching is right for you, I invite you to call for a free brief phone consultation 561 251-9768.

There are a great many reasons for the popularity of Life coaching. Here are several of the main ones:

Reason 1. Life Coaching is perceived to benefit highly functioning, generally stable individuals who are stuck, struggling with a difficult life decision or a looking for more expert advice or skills training to help them perform better in some areas of their life.

Reason 2. Life coaching focuses more on the present and the future.

Reason 3. Life coaching is goal oriented, solution focused and tends to conclude over months rather than years and often with measurable results.

Reason 4. Life coaching is more direct, interactive and often involve the coach teaching the client new skills to accomplish their goals.

Reason 5. Life coaching can be virtual via the phone or a video platform. As such, Life coaching allows great flexibility and convenience for the client and coach alike.

Reason 6. Because of the focus on resolving current issues and or teaching new skills, clients reach goals in a shorter period of time.

Overcoming Self-Deception

Self deception is a form of rationalization. It is an attempt to help you avoid facing or dealing with the truth, which can be difficult to accept at times. The teacher tells the student to “sit down”. The student complies but says to himself, “I was tired of standing up anyway”.

As a sports psychologist I often work with young athletes and their parents. Recently, I evaluated a young tennis player who wasn’t performing to her abilities and had been underperforming for some time. We identified a number of factors that were inhibiting her performance. Rather than accepting the evaluation and help to directly improve the situation, the parent and youngster interpreted the problems as “normal” and to wait and see if she would mature and grow out of it. If she was having a problem with her forehand and a pro recommended a change, would she accept the fact and do the work or wait for improvement to occur on its own?

Self-deception and rationalization is also alive and well in the professional ranks as well.

A top player on the women’s tennis tour, was well known for losing her temper during matches and losing matches as a result! As she was being interviewed, there were clips of her exploding and losing it in various matches as she was explaining that she is an “emotional” player and needs to express her emotions to play better.

The truth is most individuals still have a hard time accepting the fact that their mental and emotional state often times interfere with their performing at their best and only by working and training on specific mind-body skills can they hope to consistently perform at their best.

I once heard, “it is not practice that makes perfect, but practicing more perfectly that does.”

I welcome your thoughts and comments. Send them to Dr.Robert Heller at info@robertheller.net. If you are living or traveling to S. Florida, I am located in Boca Raton and would be happy to work with you on developing your mental toughness skills.

Anger Management: Managing by Negative Example

“Anger” is a powerful emotion which, when channeled properly can motivate and inspire us to do heroic things, perform at our best and even push us to do more than we ever thought possible. Sadly, especially in sports, anger is “mismanaged” and “unregulated” resulting in unpleasantness not only for the angry person but for all those exposed to him or her.

Since we all learn, to some extent by watching others and give extra attention to those who are famous or excel in sports, these “celebrities” can exert strong influence on our own reactions to adverse situation. Fortunately, we can use their occasional “bad displays” of behavior to take a different path when faced with similar circumstances and frustrations.

Recently, I was watching a tennis match between tennis legend and former world champion, John McEnroe. He was getting killed by an opponent and rather than give credit to the excellent play of his opponent or accept his own occasional lapses in performance, in typical McEnroe style, he would find fault with the calls, intimidate the lines people and even yell and scream at the chair umpire. Upon hitting a double fault (totally his own fault), he would then whack a ball into the stadium.

Such outrageous behavior is totally against the rules of the game and the umpire should have penalized him. McEnroe does this to try to pump himself up, distract his opponent, and intimidate the officials so he can perhaps get a favorable call or two later on. I believe some of it is just a conditioned reaction to his intolerance for others and his intensely self-critical nature.

As we watch this behavior unfold a good take away would be to feel sorry for McEnroe. How sad it must be to have such little control over his emotions and to go through life living at the edge of an explosion. How embarrassing it must be to his friends and family to see the whining, complaining and cry baby behaviors of a grown adult unfold in public before an audience of millions.

Whenever you witness this type of anger problem in someone, let it be a trigger for you to say to yourself, “That’s bad. I don’t want to ever behave that way.” “I’m in control of my emotions.” “I will find a better way to handle my frustrations and disappointments.”

In my role as a sports psychologist, I teach my clients these and other tools from cognitive therapy help them more effective “manage their emotions”, “tame their anger”

Performance Enhancement Gadgets & Gimmicks

As a sports psychologist who works with many tennis players and golfers in Boca Raton, Florida, I see and hear of lots of devices and strategies designed to improve performance. Typically advertisers find a well known celebrity or top athlete to promote their product to suggest it is the product that has helped them achieve their success and if you use the product it will help you as well!

As tennis champion Novak Djokovic has stormed into the spotlight; he is the latest to be drawn into the peak performance spot light. Last month, the attention was focused on his “secret gluten free diet”. This month the headlines in the Wall Street Journal is, “Novak Djokovic’s Secret: Sitting in a Pressured Egg”.

A company who sells the product for a smooth $75,000 claims that spending up to 20 minutes in the pod three times a week can boost athletic performance by improving circulation, boosting oxygen-rich red blood cells, removing lactic acid and other potential benefits. Djokovic gets to use the device for free and the company gets to use his quote, “I think it really helps – not with muscle but more with recovery after an exhausting set”.

A lot of the same claims can be made by having a massage – for around $75.