ANDREW R. MORTON, LICSW
WILLISTON, VERMONT
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Frequently asked questions
Click on the link at the top of the page. That will walk you through a self-screening process, and after successful screening, give you a link to my online calendar. You can then schedule an appointment that works for your schedule.
Within a business day, be on the lookout for an email to complete the paperwork. It's an easy process and prevents us from engaging in email or phone tag.
After a trial therapy, if we agree to continue with treatment, we meet once a week for an hour long appointment. Those sessions are every week at the same time and place. Often a new session you book is an ongoing slot I now have open. Unfortunately, my schedule does not work well with people who have rotating work schedules.
When you complete paperwork, you fill out a credit card authorization (I don't have access to the actual credit card number). If you are using insurance, I send them the claim and I then charge you for whatever the insurance company says is your responsibility for the session. If you are paying privately, I charge your card on Fridays. If you need a receipt to get reimbursed by your insurance when I'm out-of-network with them, I would be happy to do so.
Intensive is derived from the specific focus on the core issue that we discover. Instead of therapy being a place to vent, muse about the philosophical sufferings of humanity, or talk about how I handled a similar problem, we keep a tight and narrow focus on you and the problem you want to solve. Also, intensive is calibrated for the person in front of me, not a one-size-fits-all intensity.
Medically unexplained symptoms are just that - symptoms that can't be explained by medical examination and testing. Not all medically unexplained symptoms are psychologically based. It could be a symptom of something that hasn't fully developed yet, a symptom that hasn't been adequately assessed by a medical professional, or a symptom that is physically based, but not yet understood or discovered by modern medicine. However, if nothing else seems to explain it, we can investigate it to see if there are psychological aspects that either cause or exacerbate the symptom. For instance, anxiety can manifest itself in the following ways:
muscle tension in the jaw, neck, back, chest, abdomen, lower back and legs
shortness of breath
tension or migraine headaches
GERD
IBS
functional vomiting
choking sensations
hypertension
hypotension with loss of consciousness
memory loss
mental confusion
dissociation
pseudoseizures
tunnel vision
visual blurriness
vision loss
hearing impairment or loss
flushing
coronary spasms
unexplained abdominal pain
bladder dysfunction
interstitial cystitis
asthma
coughing
fibromyalgia
cramps
tremors
teeth grinding
vocal or other tics
Additionally, patients can have symptoms that are an identification with an aggressive impulse towards someone else, e.g., unexplained headaches that are discovered to be an unconscious desire to slap someone they love but have been angry at because of being hurt by them. Out of guilt they experience the consequence of the slap that never happened.
Short-term is defined in the clinical literature to be 40 sessions or less. It's less about a specific number, and more that short-term means that if we're very focused on the core issue, without turning sessions into a vent session or a discussion of "how was your week?", we get to the end faster. In other words, short-term by comparison to other therapies. I've worked with people for as little as one session and others for years.