Jennifer Anderson, LCSW

Jennifer has experience working with individuals, couples, families, adolescents, and children presenting with a wide variety of issues. She approaches her clients with a psychodynamic framework to gain understanding and build rapport based on creating a very warm, empathic, collaborative, and safe environment. Additionally, Jennifer integrates several treatment approaches such as CBT, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, Solution Focused, and Systems Theory. Jennifer has been a clinical supervisor for the past 15 years and has helped trained a number of marriage and family therapist interns as well as social work interns. Her approach is based on a reciprocal process whereby she models her interventions for interns in their supervision so that they can then apply similar styles in their work with their own clients. Jennifer's experience initially began in the field of Foster Care and Adoption. She was previously the Clinical Director of a non-profit agency that specializes in court ordered therapy. While in this capacity, she worked with issues such as anger management, victims of crime, substance use, and parenting. Jennifer received her master's in Social Work from USC with honors. Jennifer is a member of the National Association of Social Workers.

I am employed at Insightful Minds, Inc. where I provide individual, couple, and family therapy. Additionally I am the clinical supervisor for associate therapists. We are a team of therapists and psychiatrist who work collaboratively to help give the best overall care. For more information about me and my team, please visit our website at www.insightfulminds.org.

My view of the purpose of psychotherapy is that it provides an individual with a safe, non-judgmental space to process significant life events, difficult emotions, and recurrent unhelpful thoughts. In this way, the psychotherapy room serves as an emotional container which helps alleviate an individual's mental burden. The therapist's role is to create this safe space for the client by building trust, unconditional acceptance, and thoughtful insights that reflect what a client might be experiencing internally. In this way, the client is able to understand his or her situation and feelings in a different way and from this new perspective perhaps respond differently than before which will ultimately lead to less pain and suffering.

The duration and frequency of therapy varies from client to client depending on the nature of the issue they are coming to therapy for however, I usually request that my clients initially come weekly for the first three months in order to establish rapport, refine problem identification and definition, review significant past life information, and create a collaborative treatment plan. The most important ingredient in a successful therapy experience is the relationship between therapist and client, which takes time to develop and nurture. As the therapist and client are building this connection, they are able to use a collaborative approach to identify and define the presenting issue as well as create the pathway towards healing, which is outlined in a treatment plan. After the initial 12 sessions, therapist and client can make a decision about the appropriate duration and frequency of therapy moving forward and will continue to check-in and review this issue as the therapy continues.