About Me
Therapy at BYC
At Beautifully You Counseling, I am committed to providing compassionate and effective support for individuals struggling with eating disorders, OCD, and all things motherhood. I offer a warm and non-judgmental environment to help my clients navigate their unique challenges and embark on a journey toward healing and self-discovery.
Core Values
This is what I am all about.
Autonomy
At Beautifully You Counseling, care is collaborative and my goal is to put the client’s autonomy over their body first. Treatment should not be conditional, and it should center your needs and experiences. I work with my clients and their treatment team to provide care that takes into account their own specific needs and experiences while putting the clients’ values and goals for their health first.
Harm-Reduction
I believe any change in the direction of your goals is worth celebrating, no matter how small. Rather than approaching care through an abstinence-based model, I look to make healthier, realistic changes over time that get you closer to your goal. I don’t believe in just healing symptoms, but teaching my clients about deeper influences such as generational trauma and systemic factors that may have influenced the development of their symptoms over time.
Size-Inclusive Care
I believe all bodies deserve treatment and support in the pursuit of health regardless of size, which includes mental health! Many experience trauma as a result of rejection and invalidation from the medical community due to body size. I provide inclusive treatment for all bodies using a Health at Every Size and trauma-informed approach and believe that compassionate, relational approaches are best.
Meet the Founder
Abby Emmert, MA LPC
Founder & Licensed Professional Counselor
Training & Expertise: CBT, ERP, I-CBT, and Maternal Mental Health through Postpartum Support International
I am a non-diet, Health At Every Size Eating Disorder and OCD specialist. My passion for this work comes from recovering from an eating disorder myself, living with OCD everyday, and becoming a mom to my sweet little boy. Having struggled with disordered eating and intrusive thoughts most of my life, I always passed off those experiences as normal. It took me a long time to believe that the way I was living didn’t need to be my future. My goal is to support my clients in finding the same freedom!
My goal is to give you a warm, gentle space to explore yourself and gain a better understanding of your “why”. From there, we can start to foster a confidence that allows you to find joy and healing so you can get back to feeling yourself again.
Fun Facts About Me:
I’m obsessed with all Bravo shows
My favorite food is a toss up between pizza and a good ice cream sandwich
I am a mom to my son and fur baby, Rosie, who spin my world around!
Techniques I Use
Three Approaches to Support Your Healing
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT is the leading evidence-based approach for treatment of Eating and Anxiety Disorders. Through CBT, we are looking at unhelpful thinking patterns and beliefs (cognitions) that inform and influence unhealthy behaviors we adopt over time. Once you are better able to understand your thoughts, you are able to make changes to behaviors that may be causing distress and unhappiness in your life.
Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP)
ERP falls under the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) umbrella. It is one of the leading therapeutic techniques for treating OCD and we love using it for Eating Disorders as well. The exposure side of this technique focuses on confronting the thoughts, images, situations, and actions that you fear and provoke anxiety. After the exposure, we are working on response prevention by challenging and resisting the urge to following through with a compulsion after the trigger occurs. The goal is to reframe how the obsession and compulsion are connected in your brain so the fear is no longer seen as a threat.
Inference-Based CBT (I-CBT)
I-CBT believes that OCD uses logical information collected from different sources to create narratives or “obsessional stories” around a fear. Overtime, the over-reliance on this information rather than your senses and touch with reality cause distrust with yourself, making it hard to know what is real and what is not. As a result, you carry out compulsions that further validate the fear and the information your OCD gathered to facilitate it. I-CBT works to give you back that confidence in yourself by breaking down reasonable doubt from obsessional doubt so you can better understand how your OCD is controlling you and slowly gain back that control.