Zachary Sheeley MA, ALC

As an autistic person, this is my main focus, specifically helping autistic adults to thrive in a world that often doesn't have us in mind. My approach is heavily influenced by dialectical behavioral therapy, which has been shown to be one of the few mainstream modalities effective for autistic people.

Depression is a major focus of mine since it results from, and causes, so many other issues. I've found behavioral activation is often a good approach for this, doing little tasks that are feasible for you to build up some feel-good chemicals in your brain that give you a little more energy and motivation, a snowball effect. Sometimes cognitive approaches can help as well, depending on whether the depression is largely caused by your thoughts or a chemical imbalance/how your brain is wired.

My main experience with PTSD comes from my internship at Restore Counseling Services in Madison, AL, where I worked primarily with veterans with PTSD. My main approach for this is cognitive processing therapy, which involves analyzing your interpretation of the traumatic event and facing it head-on, talking about it directly with no sugar-coating language. This therapy is intensive but brief, typically lasting for 12 sessions.

CBT works for most populations and issues to some extent. While I don't believe it's the "one-size-fits-all" it's often thought to be, it has its place in most treatment plans for at least some element of treatment. CBT focuses on the connections between your thoughts (cognitions), behaviors, and emotions, stating each one influences the other two. Based on this principle, we work to evaluate your thoughts and change your behaviors to achieve cognitive, emotional, and behavioral changes.

This modality has the biggest impact on my approach. It focuses on mindfulness, emotional regulation, crisis management, and social skills training. Since autism is my main focus area, this is perfect, as we often struggle with emotional regulation, and this is one of the few modalities (if not the only?) that directly teaches social skills. We also are more prone to being out-of-touch with our bodies, so the mindfulness element is huge.

This modality is used for adults with trauma. You write a summary of your account of the traumatic event, then we evaluate it, searching for thinking errors to revise it to be as close to reality as possible. This is an intensive but brief therapy, typically lasting for 12 sessions. It involves facing the trauma head-on and emphasizes avoiding avoidance (for example, we would talk about "the rape," rather than saying, "the traumatic event.")