Open Mind, a Bilingual / Spanish Mental Health Counseling Center is located at the Weston Town Center since 1998. The center has been serving the West Broward community with a highly qualified staff of Mental Health professionals, who offer a personalized and integral treatment.

Our goal is to enhance the mental and emotional well being, and promote optimal social functioning to individuals, children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families.

About our services

Open Mind offers psychoterapy services to individuals, adults, adolescents, familes, and couples.

Individuals Counseling
Open Mind offers individual counseling services that involve regularly scheduled talks between the patient and a mental health professional.
The sessions may focus on current or past problems, experiences, thoughts, feelings, or relationships. By sharing experiences with a trained empathic person, talking about your world with someone outside it, you may gradually come to understand more about yourself and your problems.
We are going to provide you with the appropriate tools aimed at increasing your sense of well-being and reducing your subjective sense of discomfort.

Couples Counseling
Open Mind provides help to partners that are trying to resolve problems in their relationship.
Our counselors are third parties that can listen to both points of views without making any judgments. They are trained on understanding couples relationships and the way their interactions contribute to increasing problems in the relationship. Typically, the difficulties that arise are about the couple's roles, patterns, rules, money, intimacy, goals, and beliefs.
If you are having a communication problem, or when either party feels the need to seek counseling, or you are trying to rebuild trust after an affair, it is never too late to seek for help, and you will benefit from our services.

Pre marital Counseling
Marriage is an important and responsible decision to take. Therefore pre marital preparation is a smart decision to be taken.
This preparation consists in reinforcing and increasing conflict resolution, and communication skills, identifying couple’s strength, and manage couple’s stressors in order to develop a more balanced relationship.
It is also quite relevant to discuss financial planning, personal, couple and family goals, understanding each other's values and personality differences. In order to achieve a better understanding of personalities it is necessary to take into consideration family and culture of origin.

Family Counseling
At times it is important to have someone helping with the task of problem solving and balancing life’s difficult demands.
Family plays a key role in the wellbeing of their children. We work with the family as a whole, assisting each member in understanding their role and their impact.
Family members are going to learn new and more positive ways to communicate, replacing the old, negative communication patterns that have been harming and eroding their relationships.
The goal of family counseling is to identify the dynamics that cause problems and to institute changes in the structure or style of how the family operates. A small change in one area can often have a tremendous impact in other areas, which means that significant gains can often be produced quickly.

Group Counseling
At Open Mind you could benefit from shared experiences. Our purpose is to assist each individual in emotional growth and personal problem solving.
Usually group counseling is focused on a particular issue that may cause isolation, and a feeling that one is alone in facing one’s problems. But, by participating in group counseling, you can work against this isolation by meeting people with similar issues to enforce that difficulties are not singular to you. Additionally, knowing other people with comparable troubles can be comforting to you. Sometimes, a person may not have access in their own family and friends to people with the same problem.
Your verbal contributions to a group might be discussed, validated, and provoke problem solving by other group members in a session. Everyone is going to benefit from each other's contributions. Through acceptance and approval you’ll earn positive feedback from others, enhancing your self-esteem and emotional growth.

Children Counseling
We currently offer psychotherapy for children through play therapy and other behavioral techniques.  We also provide psycho educational evaluations administered by a pediatric psychologist.
Open Mind has specialized psychotherapists that aim at reducing those behavioral, learning and emotional difficulties that interfere significantly with a child's normal functioning.
Many children are referred to us because of anxiety, depression, attention, communication, disruptive or learning disorders, and they are always received with warmth and understanding by our professional team.
Our holistic approach is based in the concept that children (together with the symptom they present) are part of a system (biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) so the symptom cannot be explained or treated in isolation.
Based on this concept our approach is on one hand to set our focus on the specific difficulties and establish the desired goals; while on the other hand work with the entire system where that child belongs.
We frequently work in learning difficulties, anger management, conflict resolution, self esteem, assertive communication, fears, and social skills.
Our goal is to help children prevent or resolve behavioral or learning challenges and achieve optimal growth and development. 

Educational Counseling - Psicopedagogia
The goal of this program is to teach children how to learn. The concept is to motivate children to discover a different way of reasoning, in order for them to learn how to solve problems in a playful and creative way, as kids should do.  We enhance the potentials that lie in the base of any learning situation with a methodology that empowers the child’s own learning abilities.

The program focuses on training the following aptitudes, allowing the child to improve his/her reasoning and autonomy:

The goal of this program is to "Unlock your child’s potential".

This program is offered in individual or in a group setting once or twice a week.

Anxiety Disorders

Panic disorder
Panic disorder is characterized by sudden attacks of terror, usually accompanied by a pounding heart, sweatiness, weakness, faintness, or dizziness.
During these attacks, people with panic disorder may flush or feel chilled; their hands may tingle or feel numb; and they may experience nausea, chest pain, or smothering sensations.
Panic attacks usually produce a sense of unreality, a fear of impending doom, or a fear of losing control.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have persistent, upsetting thoughts (obsessions) and use rituals compulsions) to control the anxiety these thoughts produce.
For example, if people are obsessed with germs or dirt, they may develop a compulsion to wash their hands over and over again. If they develop an obsession with intruders, they may lock and relock their doors many times before going to bed.
Being afraid of social embarrassment may prompt people with OCD to comb their hair compulsively in front of a mirror-sometimes they get “caught” in the mirror and can’t move away from it. Performing such rituals is not pleasurable. At best, it produces temporary relief from the anxiety created by obsessive thoughts.
 Most of the time, the rituals end up controlling them.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov

Post traumantic stress disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) develops after a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm.
The person who develops PTSD may have been the one who was harmed, the harm may have happened to a loved one, or the person may have witnessed a harmful event that happened to loved ones or strangers.
PTSD was first brought to public attention in relation to war veterans, but it can result from a variety of traumatic incidents, such as mugging, rape, torture, being kidnapped or held captive, child abuse, car accidents, train wrecks, plane crashes, bombings, or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes. People with PTSD may startle easily, become emotionally numb (especially in relation to people with whom they used to be close), lose interest in things they used to enjoy, have trouble feeling affectionate, be irritable, become more aggressive, or even become violent. They avoid situations that remind them of the original incident, and anniversaries of the incident are often very difficult. PTSD symptoms seem to be worse if the event that triggered them was deliberately initiated by another person, as in a mugging or a kidnapping.
Most people with PTSD repeatedly relive the trauma in their thoughts during the day and in nightmares when they sleep. These are called flashbacks. Flashbacks may consist of images, sounds, smells, or feelings, and are often triggered by ordinary occurrences, such as a door slamming or a car backfiring on the street. A person having a flashback may lose touch with reality and believe that the traumatic incident is happening all over again.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/

Social phobia
Social phobia, also called social anxiety disorder, is diagnosed when people become overwhelmingly anxious and excessively self-conscious in everyday social situations. People with social phobia have an intense, persistent, and chronic fear of being watched and judged by others and of doing things that will embarrass them. They can worry for days or weeks before a dreaded situation. This fear may become so severe that it interferes with work, school, and other ordinary activities, and can make it hard to make and keep friends.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/

Specific phobia
A specific phobia is an intense fear of something that poses little or no actual danger.
 Some of the more common specific phobias are centered around closed-in places, heights, escalators, tunnels, highway driving, water, flying, dogs, and injuries involving blood.
Such phobias aren’t just extreme fear; they are irrational fear of a particular thing.
You may be able to ski the world’s tallest mountains with ease but be unable to go above the 5th floor of an office building. While adults with phobias realize that these fears are irrational, they often find that facing, or even thinking about facing, the feared object or situation brings on a panic attack or severe anxiety.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov

Generalized Anxiety Disorder
People with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) go through the day filled with exaggerated worry and tension, even though here is little or nothing to provoke it.
They anticipate disaster and are overly concerned about health issues, money, family problems, or difficulties at work. Sometimes just the thought of getting through the day produces anxiety.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov

Depression
If you feel of the following:

• Persistently sad or irritable mood
• Pronounced changes in sleep, appetite, and energy
• Difficulties thinking, concentrating, and remembering
• Physical slowing or agitation
• Present lack of interest in pleasure from activities that were once enjoyed
• Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, hopelessness, and emptiness, and recurrent thoughts of death or suicide
• Persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment, such as headaches, digestive disorders, and chronic pain       
  

These are symptoms of depression, and when you experience several of them at the same time, lasting longer than two weeks, and they interfere with your ordinary functioning, professional treatment is needed.

Post partum depression
Postpartum depression (PPD), also called postnatal depression, can affect women after childbirth.
Symptoms of PPD can occur anytime in the first year postpartum and include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Sadness
• Hopelessness
• Low self-esteem
• Guilt
• Sleep and eating disturbances
• Inability to be comforted
• Exhaustion
• Emptiness
• Inability to experience pleasure
• Social withdrawal
• Low or no energy
• Becoming easily frustrated
• Feeling inadequate in taking care of the baby
• Impaired speech and writing
• Spells of anger towards others
• Increased anxiety or panic attacks

You don’t have to keep suffering; Open Mind has specialists that can help you in this important stage of your life.

Anger Management
Anger is a normal, healthy, human emotion. But when it gets out of control and turns destructive, it can lead to problems: at work, in your personal relationships, and in the overall quality of your life.
Anger can make you feel as if you're at the mercy of an unpredictable and powerful emotion. Therefore Open Mind’s goal is to provide you with the tools to reduce both your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger causes.
You can't get rid or avoid the things or the people that enrage you, nor can you change them, but you can learn techniques to control your reactions.

Conflict Resolution
Conflict is a state of disagreement that occurs within or between people. While we usually think of conflict as a bad thing, the presence of conflict can be helpful. Conflict is usually a signal that something needs to change. If people use a constructive approach to resolving conflict they can create positive change, grow as individuals, and strengthen relationships.
There are several types of conflict. Conflict that occurs within a person is called intrapersonal conflict. This happens when a person’s feelings, beliefs and ideas conflict with each other. Conflict between two or more people is called interpersonal conflict. Conflict occurs in systems too. If you watch the news, you know that there is conflict between groups, organizations and nations.
As humans, we are responsible for choices and decisions that lead to actions, and the result of those actions.
Unfortunately, people are not born with the knowledge to solve conflicts. Because of this, we may develop mistaken habits that become unhelpful patterns for conflict resolution. By analyzing the elements of a conflict and using the most effective tools we will be able to achive a positive resolution.

Self - Esteem
How we usually feel about ourselves affects directly our experience in life, our job, love life, friendships, and the possibility to progress in life in the direction of our dreams. The way we respond to the challenges of our lives comes from our perception of whom or what we think we are.
Self-esteem is the measurement system we employ to value ourselves.
Since self-esteem is based in our own perception of us, it is subject to the quality of our insight into our own emotions and thought, and could sometimes be misleading.  Like an accounting Profits & Losses report, self-esteem measures on a daily basis the balance of our positive and negative image of ourselves, constantly updated by our experiences and the impact of our self-evaluation and the evaluation of the people we interact with produce.
If you want to raise your self – esteem you need to think in terms of turning your thoughts into behaviors. To train and develop your self-esteem is to exercise the conviction that you can become competent in life, and that you can deserve true happiness. To train your self-esteem is to broaden your capacity to be happy. 

Grief Counseling
Loss is a part of life. We can grieve for a variety of reasons at various times or ages. When grief debilitates, when a person feels unable to live normally while mourning their loss, that is when Grief Therapy becomes necessary.
Individual Grief Therapy offers healing for a wide range of losses

Stress managent
There can be positive and negative stress. Positive stress can result in taking action to successfully solve problems in our life and work, and it can result in feelings of excitement and fulfillment. Some stress is normal and even useful. Stress can help if you need to work hard or react quickly. For example, it can help you win a race or finish an important job on time.  Fun activities provide a source of eustress, the 'good' kind of stress that keeps you feeling vital and alive. It's the sense of excitement you get from completing a project, riding a roller coaster, or meeting an exciting challenge in your life. We need regular eustress in our lives, and fun activities can provide that.
Negative stress can result in our feeling of frustration, resentment, anger and even burnout and despair, along with a myriad of physical problems.
Lazarus defined stress as a condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.
When you are stressed, your body responds as though you are in danger. It makes hormones that speed up your heart, make you breathe faster, and give you a burst of energy. If you do not have the power to change a situation, then you may be able to reduce stress by changing the way you look at it.
Stress management is a learnable skill. If your methods of coping with stress aren’t contributing to your greater emotional and physical health, it’s time to find healthier ones. There are many healthy ways to manage and cope with stress, but they all require change.
Since everyone has a unique response to stress, there is no “one size fits all” solution to managing it. No single method works for everyone or in every situation, so you don’t have to keep suffering; Open Mind has specialists that can help you in finding and developing your appropriate tools to managing your stress.

West on diet
We offer an individual and group counseling program supporting your current diet in your efforts to loose weight.
People may eat more when they feel stressed, depressed, or due to anxiety, menstrual issues, cravings or emotional difficulties.
The psychological component of a successful weight loss is just as important as nutrition and exercise.
Our counseling support aimed at finding out the factors that destabilize your weight and balance your lifestyle in a holistic way.
Through this counseling support in your weight loss diet you are going to explore the emotional component of eating and its relationship with food. You are also going to renovate your relationship with your body and learn to respond in a different and  compassionate way.