Sandra Beggs, LMHC

Sandra Beggs, LMHC

MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELOR

ABOUT ME

Sandra has a warm and generous personality.  Her unique and genuine style of relating allows her to listen carefully to her clients.  Sandra wants to understand her clients’ personal strengths and resources as well as their challenges and difficulties.  She uses her skills and the tools in her “therapy toolkit” to help her client’s experience the kinds of change, healing, and/or growth they are seeking.

Clients report feeling more calm, more “in control”, more hopeful, and that they have “more tools to work with”after their sessions with Sandra.

Sandra Beggs is:

  • A Licensed Mental Health Counselor
  • A Board Certified Dance/Movement Therapist
  • A licensed Clinical Psychologist in Canada
  • Registered Clinical Counselor
  • An EMDR Practitioner

Sandra uses highly effective interventions like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in her work with clients. She is also skilled and proficient in interweaving the non-verbal therapies of Dance/Movement Therapy, and the expressive arts into her practice as appropriate; supporting her clients in accessing the wisdom and metaphors of the body and the unconscious mind.

Sandra applies traditional verbal therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), in her work with clients and she notices an enhanced level of client satisfaction and progress when she adds other therapeutic tools such as EMDR,  Dance/Movement Therapy, and Expressive Arts Therapy.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

“Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an integrative psychotherapy approach that has been extensively researched and proven effective for the treatment of trauma.  EMDR is a set of standardized protocols that incorporates elements from many different treatment approaches.  To date, EMDR has helped millions of people of all ages relieve many types of psychological stress” (www.emdria.org, 2014).

Sandra has successfully used EMDR to help her clients manage anxiety, substance abuse cravings, eating disorders, and to move past traumatic experiences. 

Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) and the Expressive Arts

Dance/Movement Therapy is the psychotherapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical, and social integration of the individual.  The benefits of dance/movement therapy as a psychotherapeutic intervention are well established.  Through movement, DMT can help individuals with a wide range of psychological disorders achieve greater self-expression (www.adta.org, 2014).

Sandra integrates dance/movement, art, music, and writing into her sessions to best support the goals and progress of her clients. Sandra works with individuals, couples, families, and groups.

Sandra uses dance/movement therapy and the expressive arts:

  • For clients dealing with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, loss and bereavement, family role change and career transition, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and children exposed to domestic violence. 
  • In the treatment of autism spectrum disorders, sensory processing disorders, and somatic disorders like fibromyalgia.
  • To help couples, parents and children , parents and teens, and families as a whole improve relationships, learn to understand others’ communication, and solve differences.

DMT is also a wonderful component of a personal growth and development journey.  Dance/movement therapy helps Sandra’s clients become more aware of the wisdom and truth in the messages of their own mind-body-spirit and helps to build skills and confidence in their ability to reach their own personal goals.

More about Sandra

Prior to moving to Florida, Sandra was part of a thriving Canadian private practice in psychology, dance/movement therapy, and art therapy.  She offered verbal therapy and dance/movement therapy in a variety of community-based settings including a child and adolescent mental health treatment center, groups for women, children, and teens exposed to domestic violence and sexual assault, and groups for women overcoming depression and dealing with transitions in life.  She presented numerous experiential dance/movement therapy workshops and trainings to professionals including child protection staff, eating disorders practitioners, multi-disciplinary mental health treatment teams, and other dance/movement therapists.

Since moving to Florida in 2005, Sandra has broadened her professional practice to include facilitating expressive arts therapy retreats for families who have a child with a chronic illness, leading parent-child interaction groups for infants and toddlers, and co-facilitating expressive arts therapy groups for children diagnosed on the autism spectrum.

Sandra presented her group work with women experiencing depression at the international conference for the American Dance Therapy Association in 2005 and for the Florida Art Therapy Conference in 2014. She has recently conducted Dance/Movement Therapy in-services for the psychology interns at Florida International University.

As a member of our treatment team at Miami Counseling and Resource Center, Sandra helps us to expand the range of treatment options for our patients and clients; bringing the unique healing and growth potential of the expressive arts therapies and EMDR to our facility.