Treatment at a Glance

Dr. Curiel is a passionate advocate and takes best clinical practices seriously.  She invests greatly each year to acquire and maintain competency for specialized treatments often not explored in-depth in graduate school.  Always striving beyond minimum continuing education content standards and hourly requirements, this includes training with renowned experts, personal literature review, consultation, training other therapists, teaching graduate students, and attending conferences. 

Dr. Curiel strongly believes in providing gold-standard, evidence-based treatments (EBTs) for the scope of disorders she has chosen to treat (all of which have symptoms that closely relate and/or require treatments with similar interventions).  This means that she strives to abide by approaches that research says are the most effective.  EBTs increase the chances of optimal symptom relief, a successful treatment outcome, a shorter treatment duration, and lower costs over time.

Many of these conditions are neurobehavioral, where the brain involuntarily "fires" false alarm signals of discomfort, intolerance, or danger, it would be unhelpful to treat symptoms with therapy that emphasizes searching for unconscious impulses or underlying meaning.  It is often thought that unresolved trauma must have caused many conditions, but in most classic presentations trauma is unrelated.  Simply exploring or trying to "reason" through symptoms typically causes the individual to remain stuck, particularly if they know their fears are irrational (or that their tics are disruptive) and they are capable of the same methods of logic independently.  Furthermore, highlighting rationality can turn into compulsions (rumination, reassurance) which make the condition worse.  

Similar to process therapies, traditional play therapy for children will often not yield the same outcomes.  CBT and Exposure Therapies emphasize changing mental and behavioral responses to the brain's "firings."  When games are utilized, they are tailored to precisely target the maladaptive mental and behavioral responses.