Hi there, I’m Taylor, pronouns she, her. I’m a licensed master social worker in New Jersey providing telehealth therapy with MacGibbon Psychotherapy practice.  My approach to therapy is eclectic and collaborative because I believe you are the expert in your own life.  Therapy with me is a partnership. I’m here to guide, support, and occasionally remind you to breathe.

Together, we’ll explore innovative evidence based tools and strategies that are most effective for you to achieve your personal goals and move towards a happier and more fulfilled version of yourself.  I draw on techniques from modalities such as CBT, DBT, and ACT to support clients across the lifespan, and I’m deeply committed to creating a safe, inclusive, and adaptable space for folks who are neurodiverse.

One of my guiding principles is that people are doing the best they can. I hold that close in my work, focusing on helping you uncover the strength you already have and building upon them.  Therapy can feel like a big step, but it doesn’t have to be scary or overwhelming.  If this resonates with you, I’d love to connect.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope we get to work together soon.

Hi, my name is Heather MacGibbon, and I’m from MacGibbon Psychotherapy. I’m a licensed clinical social worker in New York and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Iowa, and Texas, and there may be more states to come.  If you’re watching this video, it means that you’re already looking for the best path for your own treatment, and hopefully I can be a part of that path for you.

I take a multidisciplinary approach. I primarily am a psychodynamic therapist.  Which means I do have ego based approaches and I look at defenses. We might talk about the past in your family relationships and how that’s affecting your relationships currently.  But I also draw on things like dialectical behavioral therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, internal family systems, and also motivational interviewing.

I really try to draw on what other tools I think are going to help target your goals. And I want to focus on the idea of your goals because that’s what you’re coming to therapy for.  So the two of us in conversation will talk about what those goals are and try to find a treatment plan that’s going to help target them most directly.

I have a couple of specialties that I’ve developed over the years. I work a lot with anxiety and depression and life transitions. So transitioning from say high school to college or college to the workforce Those are all important times where having a therapist that is there for you is really important.

I also work with different types of trauma and use different modes of therapy along with my psychodynamic approach to kind of have a two pronged approach in dealing with trauma.  People have found it very helpful because you have to have some distress tolerance skills in place to handle what’s happening as you start to uncover your trauma.

Also, I work with a lot of gender and sexuality issues. I’ve worked a lot with the LGBTQIA plus community and a lot of non binary and trans folks on their journeys.  I do focus also on the neurodivergent community, ADHD, ASD, and finding a way to cope with the rest of the world, which I think is very important.

So having a place where that is valued, and you can talk is key.

At MacGibbon Psychotherapy we’ve started using role playing game therapy as a way to allow our clients to connect and work on interpersonal issues in a group setting.

Role Playing Game Therapy is group therapy that brings clients together with a therapeutic GM (Game Master) and a therapist to actually play interactively in a game and work on issues like personal interaction, social connection, compromise, conflict resolution, all kinds of different things that can be worked on in a gaming setting.

As a therapeutic Game Master my role is to bring the group together, provide them challenges, work with Heather, the therapist, and figure out challenges that best work for the group week to week.

One of the things that we’re able to do well together is, her acting as a player joining the game and myself as the game master running the game – it creates two different two different sort of roles for the players to players to engage with. And it’s worked out well with that.

Yeah, it’s also been really helpful in terms of being able to focus on particular issues for clients. The clients meet with me individually for therapy and so we talk about what are their personal goals, what are the issues that have been getting in the way, and then Matt and I will sit down and convene before the game sessions and talk about how that might be worked out in a gaming setting so that they can practice whatever it is that they’re working on.

And in those discussions, it’s important to realize that everything is HIPAA compliant. We make sure all of our clients understand that we will be discussing these things. And I’ll ask, I’ll basically ask Heather what sort of are the issues of the week? How can, and what are the most important things that we should be focusing on?

And I’ll do my best to tailor that week’s session to work with those issues. For example, if somebody is having family issues, I might bring family into the game session with either a parental figure being involved in the game, as an NPC, non-player character, or some other way.

Sometimes some people are having just some connectivity issues and then we’ll try to create some puzzles that the group works on together.

Yeah, and I found that it’s really helpful for clients with ADHD and clients that are on the spectrum to have a place where not only are they in group therapy and they’re like addressing their therapeutic issues, but they also have a task that they’re working on together because it, it allows them to work on, communication, interpersonal interaction, interpersonal effectiveness and things like cooperation, collaboration, and conflict resolution in a ways that are less risky to the clients than doing it out in the world without the kind of frame of the therapeutic setting.

Do we want to talk at all about how it’s caused people that were unsure about therapy to get very much involved in therapy?

Yeah. We’ve had some clients who really came for the game playing aspect, but have stayed for the therapy and have really engaged with the therapy in ways that they never imagined that they would and been able to reach Work through a lot of their depression or their trauma in ways that have been extremely helpful But it was facilitated by participating in the game the gaming group

And the other thing is with Heather as a player in the group as an ally of the group They start to think of Heather as an ally in therapy as well.

So it really creates a strong rapport.

A strong rapport.

So far, we’ve just been using Dungeons and Dragons or actually Pathfinder. But we’re going to be setting up other groups and other games as well.

About 20 percent of our clients are gamers, and not everyone in MacGibbon Psychotherapy wants to do gaming. About one in five of our clients that are interested in gaming therapy and because of that we’re obviously increasing our therapists and we’re going to be increasing the number of GMs, the number of games and the number of GMs we use, hopefully for different experiences.

So, I think our general hope is to have About 20 percent of our clients are going to be involved in game therapy and the rest probably are just going to be sticking with individual therapy. Yeah. But that number may grow or shrink, but we’re definitely seeing, we’re definitely seeing it grow.

Yeah. We’re seeing a lot of interest.

You can find more about RPG therapy through our sort of sister website battleyourdemons.com where we talk about our particular game therapy. You can look up Megan Connell who wrote the basically the book in which we base our gaming therapy, and there’s other resources that we hope to have on our website soon.

At MacGibbon Psychotherapy, we have a really strong commitment to trying to make mental health care accessible. And that means whenever possible, taking whatever insurance plan you have, as long as we’re a network and making it as affordable as we can.

Therapy is covered by a lot of insurances. It really depends on the type of plan that you have. We accept a variety of insurances at this time.  And you may have like a copayment like you would if you go to a regular medical doctor. But a lot of insurance plans will cover therapy, and we have a list of insurances on the website that we accept. You may have a copayment or a deductible just like you would have if you see a medical doctor, but that’s something that we would figure out for you before you started therapy.

Therapy is really a collaboration between the therapist and the client, and so it’s really finding the right fit, that’s why we do consultations so that we can get a sense of what your issues are and whether our approach is something that would appeal to you.

Basically, in psychodynamic therapy, it’s talk therapy, so you would come in and discuss whatever issues you’re having at the time, and we would talk about maybe how they relate to past relationships or, you know, how your thoughts, feelings, and actions are related and how you might be able to change those things as you move forward.

Generally therapy works by allowing you space and time to think about your interactions and how you may have  wanted to act in a certain situation or how you felt at a certain time. And, how that’s affected your current relationships. And so having a space to really reflect on that with somebody who’s trained in things like psychodynamic therapy or, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, which looks at thoughts, feelings, and actions, is important so that you have someone there to listen and kind of reflect with you and allow you the space to kind of heal over things that have been difficult for you.

Finding the right therapist can be a little tricky.  It’s really about the relationship between the therapist and the client. It’s one of the most important things. And so, finding somebody that you feel very comfortable talking to is really key.  And that’s one of the reasons that we offer consultations, because, you know, sometimes you’ll meet and you’ll know right away that it’s a really good fit, but sometimes it takes a few sessions.  And at least in a free consultation, you get a chance to talk to the person and get a sense of who they are before you commit to a therapeutic relationship.

Your privacy is definitely, like, utmost in our minds. All of your information is protected by HIPAA, which is the Health and Privacy Information Act in the United States.  So, anything that you say to a therapist, unless there’s a danger to yourself or someone else, is protected. We’re not allowed to disclose that information.

Right now, we’re a fully telehealth program, so you would be meeting with us on Zoom. Um, Zoom is a HIPAA compliant platform that you link to on your computer, and you can meet with us via your cell phone or your computer from the comfort of your own home. It makes commuting back and forth not an issue.  And it’s very accessible and simple for most people.