Services

What We Treat

 

At the Florida Center for Behavioral Health our mission is to help youth and adults learn fundamental social, emotional, behavioral, and thinking skills. 

 

Our staff adheres to treatments rooted in science that focus on solutions to help kids, adolescents, young adults, and families address every day issues and concerns in their lives. We understand that while kids may have excellent teachers and coaches to help them develop a wide array of skills sets from academic to athletic to musical skills, sometimes they lack supports to develop social, emotional, behavioral, and thinking skills. 

 

That is where we can help! Our doctors are trained in managing many common concerns. Here you will find a sample of issues we address!

  • Not listening
  • Difficulties accepting decisions
  • Talking back
  • Tantrums
  • Break ups/Relationship concerns
  • Anxiety (Social, Separation, Generalized)
  • Fears of the dark
  • Phobias
  • Panic Attacks
  • Mood Issues
  • Anger Problems
  • Lying
  • Stealing
  • Picky eating
  • Bedwetting (Enuresis)
  • Soiling (Encopresis)
  • Sibling conflicts
  • Academic/Work completion challenges
  • Major life events (e.g., getting a drivers license, going to college, moving out)
  • Sleep difficulties
  • Parent child conflicts
  • Parent to Parent conflicts
  • Peer bullying
  • Aggressive behaviors (home and school)
  • Difficulties making friends
  • Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
  • Tics
  • Tricotillomania (hair pulling)
  • Nail biting
  • Skin picking
  • Thumb sucking
  • Inappropriate social media/internet behavior
  • Difficulties with transitions
  • Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
  • Hygiene issues (e.g., refusal to shower or brush teeth)
  • Video game and electronic use issues
  • Self esteem concerns

Treatment delivery 

 

Parent coaching

There is no universal handbook for how to be a parent or caregiver. Parenting is arguably one of life’s most difficult jobs. As a parent, you are responsible for fostering a child’s emotional, social, behavioral, cognitive, and academic well-being. In addition, you are responsible for orchestrating the home context to ensure that they are fed, ready for school, attend their extracurriculars such as soccer practice, karate, or dance practice, are on top of their hygiene, and so much more. It is a tremendous task. Frequently, there exist snags in the flow of the familial context. Kids may not want to brush their teeth, eat what you prepared, or go to bed on time. They may have difficulties transitioning from playing their favorite video game to completing their homework. Other times, they simply do not feel like taking out the trash or setting the table. And we all know how complex that morning routine can be with just waking them up! While minor as an isolated incident, over time, repeated issues with any lack of compliance or adherence to the system can provide incredible stress to the parenting dynamic. Parents do their BEST to utilize strategies to improve the challenging circumstance. However, many times, they run out of answers. That is where we can help! Dr. Gallant has over 12 years of experience working with parents to improve the overall home context. As the orchestrators of the environment and the one’s most likely experiencing the discontent, parents can be a wonderful change agent with appropriate guidance and support! In fact, the research supports working with parents as the first line strategy for helping kids adhere to familial expectations and rules.

Individual therapy

Individual therapy consists of working one-on-one with a therapist to address emotional, social, behavioral, or thinking/cognitive related concerns. There exists a wide array of possible concerns to address in individual therapy. Dr. Gallant has been conducting individual therapy for over 15 years. Typically, individual therapy concerns consist of anxiety, mood, and anger management, relationship concerns, and learning how to improve lifestyle decisions. Individual therapy sessions are structured in 30-50 minute segments and may occur at varying frequencies (typically on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly schedule). Solution oriented individual therapy typically lasts between 6-12 sessions depending on symptom severity and client engagement. All of these factors can be discussed with your therapist at the outset of treatment.

Family therapy

Family therapy consists of including one or more members of a client's family in treatment. Typically, family therapy seeks to improve relationships in the family dynamic. These relationships may be between a child and parent, between parents, or regarding siblings. Common concerns brought up in family therapy consist of helping a parent and child communicate more effectively, establish appropriate family boundaries and policies, improve communication and coordination of family roles between caregivers. We understand the uniqueness of each family and provide custom tailored strategies and approaches to improve the family dynamic. All members of the family are welcomed to join the therapeutic experience. With client/legal guardian consent, we welcome siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and even close family friends who have a stake in the family dynamic to participate.

Therapy Techniques

Florida Center for Behavioral Health staff adhere to high-quality research supported techniques to address parenting, individual, and familial challenges. The most common techniques sought by clients include Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Behavioral Parent Coaching, and Solution Focused Therapy (SFT). You can speak with your therapist about the various approaches, and together, choose an approach or hybrid approaches that best meet your therapeutic preferences.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) asserts that a combination of flawed thoughts and maladaptive behaviors creates impairment in functioning. This approach suggests that by addressing the challenging thoughts and changing behaviors, you will find improvements in well-being. This approach will help the client understand, identity, and manage such thoughts while seeking to increase engagement in desirable behaviors. For example, consider the application of CBT with anxiety to public speaking. Many individuals present with irrational thoughts related to public speaking and, thus, avoid speaking. Using CBT, one could learn strategies to challenge and restructure fear related thoughts while gradually increasing the behavioral frequency of giving such talks.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Simply stated, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on accepting what we can not change while “taking action” towards value consistent behaviors. To do so, one will work with their therapist on exploring values, defusion exercises, mindfulness, acceptance, and committing to taking action. To illustrate, let us consider the public speaking concerns in the CBT example. We could accept that we may feel uncomfortable giving a public talk. We could also treat those horrible thoughts about "messing up" as just thoughts and not an indication of impending harm. We could focus on the present moment only. We could come into contact with our core values contributing to the talk (i.e., I want to help people and giving talks about helping people may actually help people). Lastly, we commit to living a life consistent with our values and, ultimately, give the talk!

Behavioral Parent Coaching

Behavioral Parent Coaching consists of using parents and adult caregivers as the primary change agents regarding a child or adolescent's behavior. In this model, parents are taught how to be their own behavioral psychologist and bring about change with or without child/adolescent involvement. Parent’s are recognized as the orchestrators of their context and are given the tools to maximize effectiveness managing the rules and policies of their domain. For example, consider a 4 year old child who refuses to stay in their own bed at night in lieu of sleeping with their parents. The parents are fed up and want the child to sleep independently. Instead of working with the child discussing the importance of independent sleep, the parents can learn strategies regarding appropriate sleep-time routine, how to handle sleep related non-compliance, and how to reward appropriate sleep behaviors.

Solution Focused Therapy (SFT)

Solution Focused Therapy (SFT) is typically a short-term, goal focused, targeted treatment to address a challenge with an individual or family. SFT does not necessarily seek to understand how the problem was created. Instead, SFT psychologists seek to resolve the problem by giving suggested “solutions”. For example, an 18 year old just started college and is having difficulty finding time for exercise. They report that every time they go home, they take a nap, and never make it to the gym. A solution oriented psychologist might suggest having the student pack a bag with gym clothes the night before and take it to class with them. The client could then document how many days they packed a bag the night before and how many times they made it to the gym that week. As you can see, the objective was not to identify why the student avoided the gym, the focus was on how to get them there more frequently!

Primary Care Pediatric Psychology

All too often in the field of child psychology, youth do not receive help until symptoms have gotten far too intense! 


Parents of teens will commonly report that “We’ve noticed these problems for as long as we can remember.” These same parents were told that the child will “grow out of it” or it was “just a phase.” 

 

When symptoms continue, parents will consult the internet, friends, family members, and other professionals for feedback and advice. 

When suggestions fail, parents will often resort to increasing their volume (i.e., yelling and lecturing) and the severity of the punishments (i.e., long periods without electronics). 

Many parents experience a range of emotions at this point. Some may feel guilt and shame for being “ineffective” while others experience frustration and anger towards the child.  As a result of escalating hostility, the child will start to resent and avoid the parent and the parent will feel like they have lost all hope. Parents will commonly seek professional mental health services as a last ditch effort. 

 

What if that parent was able to get assistance at the onset of symptom presentation? 


What if within the first few months of problematic behavior the parent was able to get skills to eradicate those problems? 


What if at the first signs of emotional distress a youth was able to learn coping strategies to manage their symptoms? 


Herein presents a central theme and concern in the child behavioral health field.  All too often youth are not identified for care until their behaviors, emotions, social functioning, academics, and familial context have significantly deteriorated. 

 

The focus of primary care pediatric psychology is to quickly identify and efficiently treat a myriad of concerns commonly seen in child and family functioning. 

The central premise of this model is summed up in the following metaphor – it is easier to uproot a weed when it is just sprouting versus when it is a full blown shrub!

 

The primary care pediatric psychologist has unique training in behavioral and developmental principles aimed at understanding and quickly addressing a range of commonly presenting social, emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and parenting concerns. Numerous features of the primary care pediatric model make it unique from traditional child psychology practice. Core features of the model are detailed below. Feel free to contact Dr. Gallant to learn more about the practice of primary care pediatric psychology.

The six principal themes of the primary care pediatric psychology model are:

  • Prevention of significant psychological issues through early identification of problematic social, emotional, behavioral, thinking, and familial patterns.
  • A focus on common problems or concerns
  • Supportive behavioral health education
  • Prescriptive behavioral health treatments
  • Parents and caregivers are instrumental in fostering behavioral and familial changes
  • The view that child functioning is most often a reflection of contextual, circumstantial, and environmental factors and not a result of moralistic or psychological flaws.