Treatment Approach

Dr. Spada's comprehensive experience and educational background provide her with an exhibition of theoretical frameworks at her disposal. Her treatment approach is highly personalized based on her clients individual needs and personalities. Using a highly sophisticated, multifaceted, esoteric approach, Dr. Spada is accredited to creatively move in and out of multiple theoretical frameworks in one therapy session. Dr. Spada is a master of her craft. 

MY THERAPEUTIC FRAMEWORKS

Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt therapy focuses on present-moment awareness and the connection between thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. Rather than dwelling solely in the past, Gestalt work invites you to become deeply aware of what is happening right now — in your body, in your relationships, and in the patterns that shape your daily experience. It is a powerful approach for clients seeking greater self-awareness, emotional authenticity, and a more integrated sense of self.

Humanistic Therapy

At the heart of everything we do is a deeply humanistic belief: that every person possesses an innate capacity for growth, healing, and self-actualization. Humanistic therapy places your subjective experience, your values, and your personal potential at the very center of the therapeutic process. Dr. Spada approaches every client with unconditional positive regard — meeting you exactly where you are, without judgment, without agenda, and with complete respect for your autonomy and dignity.

Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic therapy explores the unconscious patterns, early relational experiences, and deeply held beliefs that quietly shape your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in the present. By bringing these hidden dynamics into awareness, clients gain a deeper understanding of why they feel, think, and relate the way they do — and begin to make more conscious, empowered choices. This approach is particularly powerful for clients navigating relationship patterns, identity struggles, depression, anxiety, and unresolved grief or trauma.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) & Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the most extensively researched and effective therapeutic approaches available. CBT helps clients identify and restructure the unhelpful thought patterns and beliefs that contribute to emotional distress and behavioral challenges. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy builds on the foundation of CBT by adding a powerful emphasis on mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness — making it particularly effective for clients navigating intense emotions, self-harm, relationship instability, and borderline personality disorder.

Artistic & Expressive Therapy

Not everything that needs to be healed can be reached through words alone. Artistic and expressive therapy uses creative modalities — including visual art, writing, and other forms of expression — to access emotional material that may be difficult or impossible to articulate verbally. This approach is especially powerful for children, trauma survivors, and anyone who has ever felt that traditional talk therapy could not quite reach the depth of what they were carrying.

Eclectic Therapy

An eclectic approach means that Dr. Spada never limits her work to a single theoretical framework. Instead, she draws flexibly and skillfully from multiple modalities — selecting and combining the approaches that are most relevant and effective for each unique client at each unique moment in their healing journey. This flexibility is what allows truly personalized, responsive, and deeply effective care.

Client-Centered Therapy

Client-centered therapy — rooted in the pioneering work of Carl Rogers — places you, the client, firmly in the driver's seat of your own healing. Dr. Spada's role is not to direct, advise, or prescribe — it is to create the conditions of safety, empathy, and unconditional acceptance in which you can access your own inner wisdom and find your own path forward. You are the expert on your own life. Client-centered therapy honors that truth completely.

Narrative Therapy

Narrative therapy is built on the powerful idea that the stories we tell about ourselves shape the lives we live. When those stories are dominated by pain, failure, or the labels others have placed on us, they can become prisons. Narrative therapy helps you examine the stories you have been living, separate your identity from your problems, and begin reauthoring your life in a way that reflects your true values, strengths, and possibilities. It is a deeply empowering and transformative approach.

Constructionist Therapy

Social constructionism recognizes that our sense of reality — including our understanding of ourselves, our problems, and our possibilities — is shaped by the language, culture, and social contexts we inhabit. Constructionist therapy helps clients examine the assumptions, narratives, and social frameworks that have defined their experience, and begin to construct new, more empowering meanings and identities. It is particularly valuable for clients navigating identity, cultural dynamics, and the intersection of personal and social experience.

Somatic Therapy

The body keeps the score. Trauma, chronic stress, grief, and unprocessed emotional pain do not just live in the mind — they live in the body, held in patterns of tension, dysregulation, and disconnection that talk therapy alone cannot always reach. Somatic therapy uses body awareness, breath, movement, and physical sensation as pathways to healing — helping clients access, process, and release what is held below the level of conscious thought. It is a profound and transformative approach for trauma survivors, highly sensitive individuals, and anyone who has ever felt disconnected from their own body.

Strengths-Based Therapy

Strengths-based therapy shifts the focus from what is wrong to what is right — from deficits to capacities, from problems to possibilities. Dr. Spada works collaboratively with clients to identify, affirm, and build upon the unique strengths, resilience, and inner resources they already possess. This approach fosters genuine hope, self-efficacy, and the confidence to face life's challenges from a place of empowerment rather than inadequacy.

Holistic Therapy

Holistic therapy recognizes that true healing cannot happen in isolation — that mental health is inseparable from physical health, relational health, spiritual wellbeing, and the broader context of a person's life. Dr. Spada's holistic approach attends to the whole person — mind, body, relationships, and spirit — ensuring that treatment addresses not just the presenting symptoms but the full, interconnected landscape of each client's experience.

Object Relations Therapy

Object relations theory explores how our earliest relationships — particularly with our primary caregivers — shape the internal templates through which we experience all subsequent relationships. These internalized relationship patterns, formed in the earliest years of life, quietly influence how we connect, attach, trust, and relate to others throughout adulthood. Object relations therapy helps clients bring these unconscious patterns into awareness, understand their origins, and begin building more secure, authentic, and fulfilling relationships.

Motivational Interviewing

Motivational Interviewing is a collaborative, client-centered approach designed to help individuals explore and resolve ambivalence about change. Rather than pushing or prescribing, Dr. Spada uses motivational interviewing to help clients connect with their own intrinsic motivation, clarify their values, and strengthen their commitment to the changes they truly want to make. It is particularly effective in the context of addiction, behavioral change, and any situation where a client feels stuck between where they are and where they want to be.

Meditation & Mindfulness

Meditation and mindfulness practices are woven throughout Dr. Spada's therapeutic approach as foundational tools for cultivating present-moment awareness, emotional regulation, and self-compassion. Drawing from evidence-based mindfulness traditions, Dr. Spada incorporates breath awareness, body scan techniques, and guided meditation practices to help clients quiet the noise, regulate their nervous systems, and develop a more spacious, compassionate relationship with their own inner experience.

An Integrative Path That Is Uniquely Yours

No single framework captures the full complexity of a human being — and no single approach is right for every person or every moment in the healing journey. Dr. Spada's integrative, flexible, and deeply personalized approach ensures that your treatment evolves with you — drawing from whatever combination of frameworks best serves your growth, your healing, and your vision of a truly fulfilling life.