Authentic Insight

Tag: illinois therapist

  • Specialties

    Eating Disorders and Body Image

    Moving through life with an eating disorder is not an easy journey; it’s difficult to be fully engaged in life when you’re surrounded by food. It can feel as though your body is in a constant battle with your mind: do I avoid the food to avoid the fear or do I fuel my body? Is there something wrong with me if I fuel my body? Our society equates a white-centric, colonized body as a valuable body, and a valuable body as a valuable and worthy person.

    I am a certified Certified Eating Disorder Specialist (CEDS), and I am trained in ACT and CBT modalities for treating anorexia nervosa, binge eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, and body dysmorphic disorder. I work from a non-diet and HAES® lens.

    Sexual Harm, Trauma, and Loss of Self

    Discrete, life-threatening experiences aren’t the only experiences that can impart traumatic stress on you. Trauma can be caused by anything that threatens your perception of self and who you are as a person, including oppressive systems and institutions. The way trauma has affected you may not be what is traditionally represented in the media. It may be that you are struggling to find your identity, so you depend on others, or that you constantly question your reality. Maybe you have developed some coping mechanisms, and they’ve worked until now, but you’re looking to thrive rather than survive.

    Trauma informed care is the cornerstone of my work work. I strongly believe in the power of the therapeutic relationship, collaborating with the client to ensure a trustworthy and empowered relationship. I have training in cognitive processing therapy (CPT), an evidence based, manualized treatment modality, specifically for post-traumatic stress disorder.

    PhD Programs and STEM Students

    I know first hand working in high-level STEM fields can be extremely difficult. You may feel alone, isolated, and like an imposter, anxious to talk to others about how you feel. Maybe your research isn’t  progressing as quickly as you think it should, and you’ve equated that to a lack of personal progress. Maybe you are struggling to explain how you’re feeling because you are stuck in an analytical and objective mindset. Drawing on my experiences, we can work to develop coping skills for the road ahead.

  • About

    Anastasia Scangas, MSc, MSW, CEDS

    I graduated from Loyola University Chicago in 2016, with my M.S.W. My journey was a bit non-traditional: I moved to Chicago in 2011 to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry. After three and a half years, I decided that it wasn’t the right, and left with a master’s degree to attend Loyola University School of Social Work.

    While at Loyola, I focused on mental health care for disproportionately impacted and under-resourced communities. Upon, graduating from Loyola, I worked in community mental health and inpatient psychiatry, before moving to private practice.

    I continue to wear my scientist hat, routinely pulling from the current research and distilling both chemical and neurological knowledge and information for use in the therapeutic space. There is so much new research coming out linking genomics, biology, and chemistry to mental illness that we can say for sure, it is not “all in your head.”

    Anastasia is licensed to practice independently in Illinois, Colorado, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania

    Olly

    If we’re meeting virtually, Olly apologizes in advance if you hear him barking in the background. He’s trying to protect us from sirens or skateboards.