Dr. Heather Sheets has been a licensed clinical psychologist for 16 years with a doctorate degree in Clinical Psychology from an APA approved education and training program. She completed an APA approved doctoral internship at the University of Notre Dame where she received a specialty in alcohol and substance assessment and treatment. Following her internship, Dr. Sheets completed formal post-doctoral training at Northwestern University where she further developed expertise in short-term therapy, mindfullness, ACT/CBT, and narrative therapy.

The first session involves A LOT of questions! I want to learn all about you; why you are coming to therapy; what you enjoy about your life as well as what you want to change. By the end of the first session, together we develop goals you would like to accomplish in therapy. These goals will include thoughts, feelings, and maybe even physical experiences of anxiety and distress you want to change. CBT uses data from our thoughts and our behaviors to help identify what is working and what may not be working. Through identification of both positive and negative core beliefs, together we can begin to alter your experience of the world around you and change your response to increase healthy behaviors and decrease negative experiences (i.e. anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, irritability, etc).

I grew up in a small community rooted in helping one another. Helping people is part of what fills me up emotionally and energizes me. The trust people have in me as a therapist as I witness their life journeys is the true joy of my work. I am lucky to witness people change every day.

On of the bravest moments is when you may identify what you want to change in your life. That simple brave moment of identification can become an action when you think about going to therapy. Those small thoughts, questioning, and wondering what therapy is like is actually you changing as you start to think about different ways to intentionally live your life. Small moments of even answering a friend honestly when they ask "how are you?" is you being incredibly brave! So keep being brave and thinking about what you want to change! One day, you may decide therapy can be part of how you change.

I truly love my job. I care about my clients not just getting better but seeing how their lives change and they thrive. Endings with clients are sad because I no longer have the incredible privilege of witnessing their life journeys. Ending are also much sweeter when a client doesn’t credit me with their identified personal changes but instead gives the credit rightfully to themselves. At the end of our work, I hope the identified strengths, skill sets, coping mechanisms, positive qualities, and personal characteristics they have at the end of therapy they now see were present all along. Present before they even met me.

I like to start by hearing about your week, your life events, your stressors but also your positives. I truly believe in a strength based therapy and while we will talk about what is bothering you; its essential to also talk about what is going well. In some sessions, we may set goals or tasks for you to work on during the week, its important that I follow up to see how that task or goal felt and what worked and didn't. Each session is also about having you leave with a plan to implement to change what you did not like about the previous week as well as space to feel, process, and share your experience.