Dana Mooney, MA, LMHC, LPC
Pronouns:
she/her, they/them
Licensure:
Licensed Mental Health Counselor (FL): MH13991
Licensed Professional Counselor (CO): LPC.0013869
Education:
University of Central Florida
Master of Arts in Counselor Education (2013)
Bachelor of Science in Psychology (2010)
What will therapy look like?
Therapy can take a lot of shapes depending on your needs. At the core, I am a person-centered therapist. This means I believe that you are a complete and multifaceted human, an expert on your own life. You don't need anyone to "fix" you, because you are not broken. My job is to be with you as your story unfolds, and help you access your inner strengths to reach your goals.
I use a blend of Eastern and Western psychology, which each have different focuses to help people understand their suffering and the way out of it. Much of my work with clients uses mindfulness-based strategies and cognitive behavioral therapy, as the research points to these as the most effective methods for helping clients feel better.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
We all have patterns that we fall into which are unhelpful, at best. They may be learned from our family, our friends, or the society we were born into. These patterns were likely ways we learned cope with pain and adversity at some point. But time goes on, and situations change, old coping strategies can become destructive.
With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), we slow down the tendency we all have to be reactive to painful events, thoughts, or feelings, and fall into old habits. By looking at the ways thoughts, feelings, and behaviors interact, we can identify which parts of the cycle we can change to start having more positive results. Sometimes this involves identifying common errors in thinking, updating old beliefs, or changing behaviors that feed into the negative cycle.
This type of therapy is centered in the "now". While we may look into the past for better understanding of why these thoughts and feelings are coming up, we generally do not dwell there. The focus is on retraining the brain to make new connections, and therefore have different, and more positive outcomes.
How does mindfulness fit into therapy?
In addition to therapeutic training, I have also been a mindfulness practitioner since 2013, and formally became a student of Fred Eppsteiner in 2018, who was given authorization to teach from the Vietnamese Zen Master Tich Nhat Hahn.
Zen and Mahayana Buddhist teachings have reshaped the way I think about the human experience, and the multitude of ways we can cause ourselves suffering by not understanding the nature of our mind and the world around us. These 2,600 year old teachings offer a treasure trove of empowering tools to calm our minds, gain insight, train our minds to work differently, and ultimately alleviate our own suffering.
These teachings can weave their way into therapy in the form of:
- Cultivating Mindfulness of the Body and Breath
- Cultivating Mindfulness of the Mind
- Understanding how actions of body, speech, and mind impact our well-being
- Working with difficult emotions
- Seeing our tendency to cling to stability in an impermanent world
- Examining our desire to control external people and situations rather than looking inward to find peace
- Seeing how clinging to pleasure and avoidance of discomfort puts us at odds with reality
- Investigating how self-centered strivings are often at the root of our suffering, and learning antidotes to self-centeredness
- Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Equanimity, Joy, and Compassion
I have found that these strategies also work very well to compliment a Western Cognitive Behavioral Therapeutic approach.