Our Approach to Counseling

At Integrative Health Partners, we practice the integration of three major therapeutic approaches: dynamic psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness.

Psychodynamic therapy encourages insight into our relationships and the ways they affect us and our patterns of behavior. Cognitive behavioral therapy offers practical tools and techniques that directly help reduce suffering. Mindfulness enhances our self-awareness, our emotional resilience, and our enjoyment of the world around us. It has been scientifically studied and integrated into both psychodynamic and cognitive approaches.

One of our integrative psychotherapies is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). This evidence-based treatment draws heavily on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness traditions. Effective with a wide range of problems, ACT helps people actualize the deep values that make for a worthwhile life, using the resources of mindfulness, cognitive science, and neurobiology. Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is another counseling approach that we have found widely useful.

At Integrative Health Partners, we take an interactive, flexible, and comprehensive approach to mental health problems. Our style of counseling, which can be brief or long-term, can bring greater self awareness and relief from distressing symptoms including anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors. We also address concerns such as self-esteem, identity issues, and the accomplishment of personal goals.

We believe that, through an integrative psychotherapy, we can have a dialogue that is uniquely suited to your situation.  We ensure a confidential counseling relationship that is both safe and supportive, where you can feel free to discuss your struggles as well as your strengths. At Integrative Health Partners, we are deeply committed to helping you to understand yourself more deeply, and to develop the tools you need to live a valued life. 


We Can Help
With problems such as:

  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Stress
  • Relationship problems
  • Binge eating, bulimia, and emotional eating
  • Self esteem and identity issues
  • Grief and loss issues
  • Addictive behaviors



Symptom-Focused Dynamic Psychotherapy
By Mary E. Connors, Ph.D., ABPP

Traditionally, psychoanalytically oriented clinicians have eschewed a direct focus on symptoms, viewing it as a superficial turning away from underlying psychopathology. But this assumption is an artifact of a dated classical approach; it should be reexamined in the light of contemporary relational thinking. So argues Mary Connors in Symptom-Focused Dynamic Psychotherapy, an integrative project that describes cognitive-behavioral techniques that have been demonstrated to be empirically effective and may be productively assimilated into dynamic psychotherapy.


Dr. Connors's model of integrative psychotherapy, which makes cognitive-behavioral techniques responsive to a comprehensive understanding of symptom etiology, offers a balanced perspective that attends to the relational embeddedness of symptoms without skirting the therapeutic obligation to alleviate symptomatic distress. In fact, Connors shows, active techniques of symptom management are frequently facilitative of treatment goals formulated in terms of relational psychoanalysis, self psychology, intersubjectivity theory, and attachment research. A discerning effort to enrich psychodynamic treatment without subverting its conceptual ground, Symptom-Focused Dynamic Psychotherapy is a bracing antidote to the timeworn mindset that makes a virtue of symptomatic suffering.




Reviews of the Book
Published by The Analytic Press

"Symptom-Focused Dynamic Psychotherapy integrates active, instructional, and cognitive-behavioral techniques with psychodynamic principles in an impressively thoughtful, comprehensive, and compelling way. Grounding her synthesis in contemporary self-psychological, attachment, and relational theories, Connors shows how the skilled application of symptom-focused techniques is often the most attuned, relationally-responsive intervention a therapist can make. Moreover, Connors' conceptual clarity and clinical wisdom combine to make this book highly useable not only as a guide for experienced clinicians of various theoretical persuasions, but as a comprehensive text for graduate and professional students in the mental health fields."

      Steven Stern, Psy.D.
Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis


"Connors' writing reflects both rigorous scholarship and great personal warmth. The comprehensiveness of her treatment of her material and the clarity of her prose will be appreciated by teacher, student, and clinician alike. It is also a particular gift of this volume that the working clinician is offered a pathway through which neither depth-psychological understanding not symptom-focused relief has to be sacrificed in providing sound clinical care."

Jill R. Gardner, Ph.D.
University of Chicago


"This is a book filled with uncommon clinical wisdom. The interventions suggested by Connors are consistently informed by deep understanding of their meanings for the patient, and her attention to character, transference, and countertransference are masterful. At the same time, she demonstrates clearly how the deeper aims of psychoanalytic work can be enhanced rather than compromised by thoughtful inclusion of methods whose origins lie outside the psychoanalytic tradition. Connors is theoretically sophisticated, but it is the patient and his or her suffering, rather than theoretical 'purity,' that is the central focus of her work."

Paul Wachtel, Ph.D.
City College and CUNY Graduate Center