Contact Information
Phone: 630-522-3124
Email: dscolan@theocdandanxietycenter.com
Location: Oak Brook & Telehealth (Illinois, Georgia, Nebraska)
Dina’s Take on Treatment
“Starting treatment is simultaneously both an exciting and scary experience. People come into my office because they have become increasingly frustrated with the impact that anxiety has had on their lives. Most of them have been limiting their actions and making their lives smaller in an effort to find a comfortable, anxiety-free state of mind. Therapy is a collaborative effort to lift those limitations and take back control. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience to be on that journey and empower people to live a full life.”
Approach to Therapy
Dina possesses extensive training in cognitive behavioral therapy and routinely integrates the teachings of Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and mindfulness into her clinical work. Teaching others to better regulate their emotions and tolerate physical/emotional distress is pivotal to Dina’s clinical focus. She adopts a collaborative, problem-solving approach to therapy, helping her patients set challenging but attainable goals so that they can achieve the life they deserve.
Utilizing her clinical expertise and a deep commitment to helping her patients, her therapeutic style blends a warm, compassionate approach with serious goal setting. Bringing over 20 years of clinical experience, Dina is a seasoned clinician specializing in anxiety disorders who has worked in virtually every level of care in the behavioral health care system.
Because knowledge is power – Dina takes time to educate her patients on how anxiety works, what’s happening in their body, what maintains it and what will extinguish it. Families of her patients will be included to help support their loved one but also to help change behaviors and patterns in the home environment that may be maintaining or contributing to anxiety. Because defeating anxiety requires exposure to anxiety producing situations, Dina teaches her patients DBT and mindfulness techniques to arm them with distress tolerance skills so that they can regulate their emotions when anxious or while working the steps of exposure treatment.
Experience and Training
Dina earned her Bachelors degree from the University of Iowa and went on to earn her Masters Degree from Benedictine University. She has worked in inpatient, outpatient, residential, and private practice settings. She has extensive experience applying Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), and Cognitive interventions to the full spectrum of anxiety and mood disorders. As a graduate of the Behavioral Therapy Training Institute through the International OCD Foundation, Dina offers trainings to other therapists on the use and implementation of Exposure therapy. She is comfortable treating children, adolescents and adults struggling with OCD, PTSD, social phobia, school refusal, specific phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder and depression. Additionally, she has received specialized training for teaching social skills to individuals on the Autism spectrum through the PEERS program at UCLA and for treating body focused repetitive behaviors through the Trichotillomania Learning Center. Dina is a member of the International OCD Foundation as well as The Anxiety Disorders Association of America. Utilizing her clinical expertise and a deep commitment to helping her patients, her therapeutic style blends a warm, compassionate approach with serious goal setting. Bringing over 20 years of clinical experience, Dina is a seasoned clinician specializing in anxiety disorders who has worked in virtually every level of care in the behavioral health care system.
More About Dina
Dina was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. In her spare time she enjoys staying active, going to concerts, and spending time with her teenage twins.
