Alex Garber, LCSW
Licensed Clinical Social Worker
"Helping Adults Find Greater Peace, Happiness, and Fulfillment." 

I work with adults who are looking to commit to their healing, access their personal power, and let go of patterns that are no longer serving them. I offer unique forms of individual counseling and emphasize the mind + body connection. This approach allows me to support all aspects of you and enhances overall treatment. 

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I have a special calling for working with...

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Young Adults: 

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I love working with young adults who are seeking support surrounding challenges such as depression, anxiety, life changes, self-esteem issues, difficulty with/forming relationships, chronic illness and co-dependency. I enjoy teaching my clients about boundaries and empowering them to set healthy limits so they can say no when they want to and free themselves of resentment. My work aims to enhance and strengthen the relationship with self as one that can be trustworthy, reliable, and safe.

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LGBTQIA+ Individuals: 

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I work with LGBTQIA+ individual’s on topics such as: coming out, conflict with family and friends, acceptance, sexuality, gender dysphoria, gender identity, internalized homophobia, cultural issues, self-esteem, shame, intimacy, trauma, substance use/abuse, anxiety and depression. 

Many of the LGBTQIA+ clients I work with have experienced a lot of societal or religious shame about their identity and struggle to move through life with this overbearing feeling of “wrongness.” Even individuals who come from a support family or family of choice experience so many challenges when being in a group that is oppressed.

These challenges can look like:

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• fear of holding your partners hand in public

• fear of safety

• apprehension about sharing details about your partnership with loved ones 

• and even the casual things like... not speaking up to correct someone when they assume you are in a heterosexual relationship 

• Etc...

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Inner Child:

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Inner child work is something I touch on often in sessions since many of our experiences as children shape how we see the world. Inner child work promotes a person’s ability to feel safe within themselves and therefore develop a stronger sense of identity, self-worth, a stronger ability to make decisions, keep promises to themselves and regulate their emotions.

Inner child work is a great tool that helps clients lean into better understanding themselves and out of patterns of judgement. This allows them to gain a better understanding and explore the possibility of forgiving both those who have hurt them, and themselves for not knowing better or having access to the right tools at the time.

Inner child work emphasizes the innate innocence we all are born with as children and allows us to connect to a person who perhaps feels unworthy, unlovable, out of touch and deprived. We tend to be hypercritical of ourselves. We’ve all heard the expression that "we are all our own worst critic". Unfortunately, this tends to be true more often than not.

Once engaging the inner child, we are able to fine tune a sense of compassion that otherwise is challenging to tap into, especially if our conditioning is that of judgement. Oftentimes this comes from an absent or judgmental caretaker, which then becomes our inner voice. Inner child work serves to allow you to acknowledge where your inner self talk comes from and begin to create your own inner voice.

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Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents/Addicts or Alcoholics:

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I find myself drawn to helping others who have experienced a chaotic, unsafe or dysfunctional parental relationship(s). Many of my clients have experienced or are currently experiencing some form of abuse or neglect from their caretakers, whether that be emotional or physical.

Majority of my clients who have trauma or come from households where their needs were not met will say things such as “other people have it worse” or “it wasn’t that bad” and part of our work together is normalizing and empathizing with the many challenging circumstances that one may have gone through. 

When our caretakers are unavailable physically or emotionally, violent or angry, give us the silent treatment, are unable to attune to our emotions etc., it causes us to shift into survival mode in order to most safely meet our own needs.

Oftentimes children find themselves growing up very quickly, over-performing or acting out to be noticed, taking on parental roles or feeling all alone. The long-standing effect of this leaves us in survival mode later in life when we no longer need or want to be, which gets in the way of living life fully. With this, we see lots of substance use/abuse, people pleasing, fear of abandonment and co-dependency. 

It is my aim to support my clients in identifying their experiences, work through boundary setting, forgiveness, establishing safe and positive support systems and enhancing emotion regulation.

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Neuro Emotional Technique (NET):

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I specialize in a unique approach known as Neuro Emotional Technique (NET). This is a holistic and alternative mind-body technique which aims to get to the root of emotional pain, trauma and stress. This technique was actually founded by two chiropractors, who were encountering patients that were receiving the same chiropractic adjustments again and again, with the same issues persisting, despite intervention. The founders decided there was something deeper happening beneath the surface and created what we now know as NET. NET draws on a blend between Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western Techniques. 

NET uses muscle monitoring to communicate directly with the body and assess a person's response to any given stimulus. NET also uses acupressure, where I will guide you to provide a light or deep touch on your own pressure points as part of the healing process. 

You might be thinking, what is muscle testing? Simply stated, the body has within it and surrounding it, an electrical network. If anything impacts your electrical system that is not helpful to your health and body's balance, your muscles, when having physical pressure applied, are unable to hold their strength. (Muscle power = balance).

In other words, if pressure is applied to an individual's extended arm while the body is being adversely affected (by something like stress or trauma) the muscles will weaken and the arm will not be able to resist the pressure. When pressure is applied once becoming more neutral (less impacted by the stress or trauma), the muscles remain strong and will easily resist the physical pressure that is applied when using the therapy. We can think of this as similar to the "knee jerk reflex" we have. You may be familiar with this test - it is where the doctor hits your knee at a spot just below your knee cap and your leg kicks out. 

NET is really unique in that you are able to use your own body as a mechanism to support and help guide your treatment, with you seeing the change in muscle strength (congruency with feeling better) as you go! When you are doing this, you are really able to access the complex's stuck in your body that are getting re-triggered in the present day.

For example, when we are becoming anxious and have no idea why - there is a reason why! Sometimes we may not be able to consciously put together what is happening, but our body is our best guide in telling us what is happening and what we need to return to baseline. This mind-body modality encompasses and engages all aspects of each individual and is really able to provide phenomenal results.

When doing NET with me, you can expect the negative charge associated with difficult feelings or trauma to minimize and to return to baseline, so that you can live your life to its absolute fullest.

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Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder/Neurodiverse Individuals:

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I work with those on the spectrum for a number of personal reasons. You may also see I am using the word neurodiverse, as opposed to the term autism spectrum disorder. Neurodiversity is a movement that aims to change the way we think about autism. It rejects the view that autism is a disorder and instead sees it as a neurological difference, which simply results in a unique way of thinking and experiencing the world. This helps reduce stigma associated with being on the spectrum.

I work with neurodiverse individuals on things such as: the building of social skills, increasing flexibility in social situations, aiding in developing a greater understanding of one’s own unique qualities and strengths, creating skills for coping with sensory burnout, reduction of self-doubt and self-criticism, development of anger management skills as well as to increase social success and emotional regulation.