Elke Schlager, Ph.D

I am a Harvard trained psychotherapist with over 18 years of clinical experience with children, adolescents, and adults in English and Spanish.

I work extensively with patients who are experiencing depression, anxiety, trauma and other emotional problems. I have special interests in helping patients who are undergoing life transitions such as separation and divorce, bereavement, career and acculturation. Also, have extensive experience working with women's health concerns such as postpartum depression, infertility, menopause and eating disorders.

For the last nine years, I have practiced and researched Intensive Short term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP) with Dr. Leigh McCullough at Harvard Medical School. STDP, also known as the Affect Phobia Model, incorporates aspects of psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, experiential, and mindfulness approaches. Extensive research has shown the Affect Phobia Model to be effective treatment for helping patients achieve rapid and effective change through deep exploration of the emotional roots of their problems.

I have extensive experience in mindfulness and mind/body work. I trained at Jon Kabat Zinn's Stress Reduction Program Center for Mindfulness at UMASS-Worcester and served on the faculty of Herbert Benson's Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School. Mindfulness approaches can be a helpful way of allowing people to become more attuned to, conscious of, and welcoming of their whole range of human emotion. In doing so, we become aware of the unconscious ways we divert ourselves from our true emotional experience. This inability to access true emotional experience is directly linked to the many symptoms (insomnia, anxiety, obsessive thinking, irritability, isolation, physical pain) that encourage patients to seek out psychotherapy treatment.

By combining STDP with mindfulness approaches, I can help my patients to more fully understand a wide variety of emotional, physical and behavioral problems, reconnect both with others and with important parts of themselves that they may feel they have lost, and use this reconnection to help resolve issues that are keeping them from fully enjoying and experiencing life.

I am also trained and certified in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which is a psychotherapy treatment for helping patients process, integrate and bring past traumatic memories to an adaptive resolution.

I am a co-founder of For the Sake of the Children, a program mandated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for parents undergoing divorce in the communities of Brookline, Cambridge and Cape Cod. Over 6,000 parents have completed the program since 1998.

I am co-authoring a book with Dr. McCullough and the Harvard Psychotherapy Research Group titled, The Affect Phobia Model for Treating Cluster C Personality Disorders: A Research-Based Psychodynamic Approach for treating Obsessive Compulsive, Dependent, and Avoidant Personality Disorders, which will be published by Hogrefe Press.

Affect Phobia Model
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
For the Sake of the Children