Dan Gilner (he/his)

I have extensive training from one of the world's leading experts in Dissociation and Depersonalization and Derealization Disorder DP / DR from Dr. Willoughby Britton, Director of Brown’s Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the Warren Alpert Medical School. With Dr. Britton I co-lead a training for Postdoctoral fellows at the Osher Institute for Integrative Medicine at Harvard University Medical School in March 2023, which included training on the neuroscience of dissociation.

I have training and experience with both systematic behavioral desensitization training and Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy. I also have training on how to incorporate somatic based therapies into modalities such as exposure and response prevention to help address the often times uncomfortable somatic experiences of exposures. I also have specific training on nervous system hypersensitivity, including the neuroscience of hypersensitivity, from Dr. Willoughby Britton.

The therapeutic modalities that I am trained in and use are all effective at engaging with anxiety. Woven together, they help us address different parts of ourselves that are contributing to our anxiety. Primarily I work with anxiety through Cognitive and Behavioral and Compassion Focused Therapy, however Somatic and Existential Therapy can also help to address more subtle areas of our anxiety.

Fundamentally this is a therapy that helps us reshape the basic interactions between our thoughts, feelings, and our behaviors. We do this through desensitizing ourselves through graded and safe exposures to help decouple intrusive thoughts from intrusive somatic feelings. When we have thoughts that create hyper-arousal in our nervous system, and then we respond in a safety seeking manner, we are learning that we are not safe, when in fact we are.

Contributes to spiritual integration, aiding in understanding, building, and repairing your unique frameworks of self. Sometimes in life we experience events such as death, loss, life disruption, and other events that fundamentally disturb our sense of self. Our sense of self is the foundation of who we are, and when it becomes disturbed, it can create a host of cognitive and somatic issues. We want to feel whole, and when we feel broken, at our core, existential Therapy helps us to rebuild.

Cultivates a heightened awareness of thoughts and feelings and helps you reshape unhealthy cognitive and behavioral patterns linked to those thoughts and feelings. In essence, we learn to witness what is arising in the mind, and how it is connected with our thoughts, emotions, and actions. When we can understand the interconnections between these, we can disrupt maladaptive or harmful patterns and create new adaptive and healthy patterns and interconnections.

Cognitive Therapy cultivates a heightened awareness of thoughts and feelings, while Behavioral Therapy helps you reshape unhealthy patterns linked to thoughts and feelings. Ultimately CBT is a therapy aimed at cultivating awareness of the inter-linkages between our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, so we can understand and identify unhealthy patterns and connections. When we understand these connections we can learn new and more adaptive patterns and connections.

Essentially what Somatic Therapy does is offer us a gateway to connect with feelings in our nervous system. When we feel threatened, anxious, depressed, angry, etc., there is a somatic or embodied quality of that feeling. Anxiety may feel like a hot wave moving up through the next and head, or a tightness in the chest. When we are aware of how our nervous system is responding to our thoughts and feelings, we can engage in body based and behaviorally enacted therapy techniques to be regulated.

Existential Therapy contributes to spiritual integration, aiding in understanding, building, and repairing your unique frameworks of self. Sometimes events in life such as death, loss, relational change, work or environment change, can disrupt our often very concertized sense of self. That sense of who we are as a person. When this sense becomes disrupted, we may experience a host of adverse effects. Existential Therapy is about healing our sense of self.