Therapy Services To Help You Move Towards Change
Therapy offers a space to slow down, make sense of your emotions, and better understand the patterns that feel hard to change.
Together, we build insight and practical tools to help you move towards feeling more steady, more in control, and more confident.
Many people come to therapy feeling overwhelmed, stuck, or unsure how to move forward.
Feeling overwhelmed by intense or hard-to-manage emotions
Anxiety or racing thoughts that won’t slow down
Difficulty setting boundaries in relationships
Feeling stuck in patterns you want to change
Navigating life transitions that feel uncertain
Wanting tools to better understand yourself
You might understand what’s happening, but still feel caught in it, and over time, that can feel exhausting.
Some of the experiences I commonly see include:
Therapy that helps you understand and respond differently.
Therapy is a collaborative process where we work together to better understand your experiences, emotions, and patterns.
Rather than just talking through challenges, we focus on building insight and skills you can use in everyday life.
Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), we focus on emotional regulation, communication, distress tolerance, acceptance, and mindfulness to help you navigate difficult situations more effectively.
Over time, this work helps you feel more confident, steadier, and more capable in how you respond to life’s challenges.
Meet Cristina
Cristina Oliver is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing therapy in Doral and the Miami area, with over a decade of experience helping individuals, couples, and families navigate anxiety, depression, and relationship challenges.
She specializes in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a structured, skills-based approach that helps people better understand intense emotions and change patterns that no longer serve them.
Her approach is collaborative, direct, and compassionate, balancing insight with practical tools so you can create meaningful, lasting change.
Together, we begin to make sense of what you’re experiencing and identify the patterns that may be keeping you feeling stuck.
Using a collaborative, DBT-based approach, sessions focus on building emotional regulation skills, improving communication, and developing tools you can use outside of therapy.
This work helps you move towards feeling more steady, more confident, and more in control of how you respond.
Individual therapy sessions are 50 minutes and offered in person in Doral or virtually across Florida.
miami beach therapist
The services
Living Fully Psychotherapy also offers several additional services to support individuals, couples, and families.
MENTAL HEALTH THERAPIST MIAMI
DBT Skills Training
Individual and group DBT skills training focuses on mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness skills.
This training is ideal for those looking to build concrete skills or for clients working alongside another therapist.
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Couples therapy supports partners navigating communication challenges, emotional disconnect, and recurring conflict.
Sessions focus on building understanding, improving communication, and creating more stable, secure patterns in the relationship.
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Parent coaching helps caregivers support highly sensitive teens and adult children who struggle with intense emotions.
The focus is on improving communication, emotional understanding, and behavior management, while maintaining a supportive and respectful relationship.
What is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)?
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based therapeutic approach originally developed by Marsha Linehan. It was created to help individuals who experience emotions very intensely and want to better understand their reactions, improve relationships, and respond to difficult situations in more effective ways.
At its core, DBT helps people slow things down enough to better understand what they’re feeling, why they’re reacting the way they are, and how to respond differently in the moments that feel hardest.
Through DBT, clients learn skills from four main areas: mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness helps clients slow down and become more aware of what’s happening internally and externally in a nonjudgmental way without immediately reacting.
Over time, this can help reduce impulsive reactions, increase clarity, and make it easier to respond in ways that align with personal goals and values instead of reacting automatically in the moment.
Emotional Regulation
Emotion regulation focuses on understanding emotions rather than fighting against them. Clients learn how to identify emotions, understand what they’re communicating, and develop healthier ways to respond to them.
The goal is not to stop emotions from happening, but to build a healthier relationship with them so they feel less overwhelming and easier to navigate.
Distress Tolerance
Distress tolerance skills help clients get through emotionally overwhelming moments without making situations worse.
This includes learning ways to tolerate distress during a crisis, while also developing acceptance skills that help reduce suffering when facing painful situations that cannot immediately be changed.
Interpersonal Effectiveness
Interpersonal effectiveness focuses on communication, boundaries, and relationships.
Clients learn how to express their needs more clearly, navigate conflict more effectively, maintain self-respect during difficult conversations, and create healthier relationship patterns over time.
How can DBT be used in therapy?
DBT can be incorporated into therapy in different ways depending on a person’s needs, goals, and level of support needed.
DBT-Informed Therapy
In DBT-informed therapy, we integrate specific DBT skills that are most relevant to what you’re currently struggling with. This approach can be helpful for people wanting support with emotional regulation, anxiety, communication, relationship challenges, impulsive reactions, or distress tolerance while still engaging in a more traditional therapy format.
Comprehensive DBT
Comprehensive DBT is a more structured treatment approach designed for individuals experiencing more significant emotional dysregulation or behaviors that are affecting safety, stability, relationships, or overall quality of life.
This approach includes weekly individual DBT therapy, weekly DBT skills training group, in-the-moment coaching support between sessions, and my participation in a DBT consultation team with other DBT therapists.
Clients also complete a daily diary card to track emotions, urges, behaviors, and coping skills. We use this together in sessions to better understand patterns, identify what may be contributing to emotional reactions, and develop more effective ways to respond using DBT skills.
Comprehensive DBT requires a minimum six-month commitment and begins with a pretreatment phase where we assess fit, build commitment to the process, and prepare for the structure of the program. Because DBT is a highly structured and active form of treatment, readiness and commitment are important parts of determining whether this approach is the right fit.
Living Fully Psychotherapy operates as a self-pay practice with transparent pricing and flexible payment options.
American Express, Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and cash.
CareCredit is also accepted as a financing option.
Session fee pricing is as follows:
Accepted forms of payment include:
A superbill can be provided for clients who wish to seek reimbursement through their insurance plan.
Carisk is currently accepted for University of Miami faculty and staff.
Living Fully Psychotherapy primarily operates as an out-of-network provider.
Fees & Payment Information
Living Fully Psychotherapy Policies
- Free 15-minute consultation available for new clients
- A 24-hour notice is required for cancellations
- Late cancellations or missed appointments are charged the full session fee
- Therapy services are provided to clients located in Florida
