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Behavioral Health Therapy
Behavioral health is a type of therapy that focuses on the powerful connections between your thoughts, feelings, and actions using evidence-based approaches to help people heal and recover. At Integral Physical Therapy, our multidisciplinary model—integrating Behavioral health, Physiatry, and Physical Therapy—is designed to treat the thoughts and feelings that impact your physical recovery. As a core part of this triangle of care, our behavioral health therapist addresses symptoms such as chronic pain, sleep disturbance, stress, mood, and sense of self, helping you replace unhelpful coping strategies with effective tools to foster lasting well-being.
When to consider seeing a Behavioral Health Therapist
You should consider seeing a behavioral health therapist if you are experiencing difficult thoughts or emotions, or other psychological issues that are impacting your physical health, recovery, or overall well-being. Behavioral health can also help when you are struggling to make changes to your activities or behaviors, sleeping poorly, or struggling to get back into important or meaningful activities. Our integrated care model is designed to break the cycle of chronic pain by tackling the underlying emotional barriers, such as stress, sadness, and fear of movement that can impede recovery. By focusing on the connection between your mind and body, we help improve outcomes for your physical recovery and foster long-term mental and physical health.
How a Behavioral Health Therapist can help
Behavioral health therapy is focused on improving your overall well-being by addressing the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral factors that impact your physical health and recovery.
We help our patients:
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Take control of pain and recovery: By helping manage symptoms like chronic pain, poor sleep, high stress/anxiety, and depression that often interfere with your body's natural healing process. Our therapist will work with you to replace unhelpful coping strategies with healthier, more effective responses to physical challenges and pain, supporting a smoother road to recovery.
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Reduce stress and anxiety related to injury: With focused and guided counseling, our therapists help you manage a range of thoughts and emotions related to your recovery. We rely on the powerful mind-body connection to help you foster long-term improvements in both your mental and physical health, reducing your time to recover.
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Optimize physical therapy outcomes: When behavioral health therapy is combined with physical therapy, it often leads to better overall outcomes and reduced chronic issues such as pain, stress and anxiety. Together, our behavioral health therapist and physical therapists work as a team to help address physical issues in addition to the emotional and cognitive issues—such as fear of movement or anxiety about the future—that frequently act as barriers to a full recovery.
Meet our clinical leader in Behavioral Health: Dr. Elizabeth Ahlers
Dr. Elizabeth Ahlers, PsyD
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Licensed Clinical Psychologist
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Fellowship Trained in Behavioral Pain Management
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Dr. Elizabeth Ahlers graduated from the University of Denver's Graduate School of Professional Psychology with her Doctorate of Psychology in 2018. She then did a fellowship in Behavioral Pain Management at Geisinger Hospital in Pennsylvania, before happily moving back to Colorado to practice pain psychology. She has prior experience working on interdisciplinary pain teams after working at Lutheran Spine Center and is excited to bring that expertise to the team here at Integral Physical Therapy.
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Dr. Ahlers specializes in helping people adjust to living with chronic health conditions, particularly coping with chronic pain. She uses evidence-based treatments to help address the biopsychosocial aspects of chronic health problems. She believes that the mind-body connection is powerful and that by addressing thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, impactful behavior change can happen.
Support she provides:
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Pain psychology/Health psychology
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy(ACT)
Insomnia treatment/Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Chronic Pain (CBT-CP)
With the integration of Behavioral Health and Physiatry alongside traditional Physical Therapy, Integral Physical Therapy is a multidisciplinary practice. This comprehensive team approach ensures better access to specialized care, facilitating faster recoveries and lower long-term costs for our patients. By combining these three core disciplines, we are equipped to quickly evaluate, diagnose, and create an optimal, holistic treatment path that addresses not just physical symptoms, but also the emotional and psychological factors that influence recovery.