Our Philosophy

Treatment is client centered, focusing on an individual’s strengths and teaching skills to reach one’s full potential. Anxiety, stress and challenges are part of life and can significantly impact our emotions, relationships, and daily functioning. At Thrive Anxiety and Wellness we provide skills and support to empower you to heal, make changes in your life, and learn to tolerate uncertainty and stressors in order to meet your goals. Therapy is intended to be short term and goal focused with the client taking an active role in the process. The Client sets measurable, observable goals and the client and therapist work together to design a tailored treatment plan based on research based effective treatments and client strengths. Progress towards goals are regularly assessed to help maintain motivation and reach goals as quickly as possible. The therapist is like a coach and the Client works in sessions but most importantly outside of sessions applying what is learned into daily life. 

At Thrive Anxiety and Wellness, we believe that our current medical (including mental health) symptoms are influenced by a combination of physiological factors, emotional factors, cognitive (the way we think) factors, behavioral factors, and environmental factors. Treatment, therefore, focuses on addressing each of these areas. As a result, Dr. Huss works closely with the Client’s medical team. Mindfulness Based Cognitive Behavior therapy (MBCT),, Exposure Response Prevention (ERP), and Relaxation/Biofeedback strategies are used. Basically, individuals are taught how to relax the body, refocus the mind from the mental loop of unhelpful negative thoughts to the more helpful thoughts that exist in the present moment, and begin spending more time on activities and with people that are most important to their lives. Treatment may involve trying to reconcile past and current events, reducing focus on potential problems in the future, and facing really anxiety provoking situations while giving one’s body a chance to desensitize to the intense anxiety/physiological experience. The acronym THRIVE helps describe the process:

Hope...

While we focus in the moment, it is important to have hope for a positive future and believe that we can reach our goals. Therapy focuses on setting realistic, smaller goals that lead to the bigger goals and we develop clear steps to achieve the goals. 

Refocus...

It is so easy to become stuck and our lives revolve around the problems. We can learn skills that help us to catch the mental traps and refocus on the things in the present moment that are good, that make life worth living. If we are not sure what these things are, we start therapy by identifying these and figuring out how to do them each day despite everything else competing for our attention. 

Integrate...

We want to have balance in many different ways. We want balance between resting and active movement, between giving time for oneself and giving time for one’s responsibilities and other priorities in one’s life. We learn how to make a To Do list based on blessing ourselves, blessing others, and achieving goals. This may also involve learning when to say No and when to ask for help.

Values

 It is important that we can see our values through how we spend our day, what we say, and what we think. It helps to identify our purposes in life, our gifts and talents, and the things that fulfil and challenge us. We need to schedule our day around these vital life lines. We want to see these values in all areas of our lives so that when one area of life is experiencing challenges, other areas still remind us of our worth and purpose.

Encourage...

We are not meant to live in isolation and only focus on ourselves. Positive, healthy relationships where each person can encourage, help, and hold accountable the other person is when life has value. We experience love when we can care for others and when we allow others to care for us. What good are our gifts and talents if we do not get to use them to help others or to make this world a better place? Learning to develop healthy boundaries, assertive communication skills, and developing a healthy support system is important. Teaching and encouraging others reinforces our values, gifts, and talents.