From the Founders
Our origin story is a winding one, as life tends to be. As the three eventual co-owners of CBTeam, we shared a similar path of personal and professional growth that led to the founding of CBTeam and the core values we chose to define our business.
Professionally, we each excelled in getting the “right” experiences as trainees and young professionals to be experts in the field. This involved accolades like earning national distinction as a graduate student researcher and clinician (Adam Reid), designing and leading a successful clinical training and research program at the OCD Institute (Jason Elias), and building human resource departments in the finance industry (Kim Smith).
Our origin story is a winding one, as life tends to be. As the three eventual co-owners of CBTeam, we shared a similar path of personal and professional growth that led to the founding of CBTeam and the core values we chose to define our business.
Professionally, we each excelled in getting the “right” experiences as trainees and young professionals to be experts in the field. This involved accolades like earning national distinction as a graduate student researcher and clinician (Adam Reid), designing and leading a successful clinical training and research program at the OCD Institute (Jason Elias), and building human resource departments in the finance industry (Kim Smith).
Yet, as internationally recognized “experts” we still felt unfulfilled and unsatisfied. Part of this was an underlying imposter syndrome that came from a professional field where expertise meant always having the answers and only clients are allowed to struggle emotionally. This inaccurate dynamic didn’t allow space for open collaboration, genuine human connection, and exploration of the shared human experience, all where we believe the most meaningful growth happens. Science has given us a lot of fantastic therapeutic strategies, but the typical therapeutic environment felt inadequate for meaningful change to occur in a lot of our clients trying to use these strategies.
We wanted to create a therapeutic environment where it’s okay for everyone to say “I don’t know” and both the client and the therapist share openly about the beauty and suffering of life. We want to mix empirically-backed therapeutic strategies derived from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with open experimentation and non-judgmental focus on what’s not working.
Often the techniques taught in therapy are solid but the implementation of these strategies inadvertently reinforces negative beliefs and rules that created the problem in the first place.
Exposure therapy, or the act of engaging fully in valued-activities in order to learn from real-life experience (versus the stories we tell ourselves), is at the core of our clinical work as it embodies these values of experiential learning, openness to all emotional experiences, and acceptance of imperfection and failure. As opposed to a sterile, white-coat medical experience, we hope CBTeam feels like an extension of your own home, fosters real relationships with our expert clinicians that are based on compassion and vulnerability, and fosters a life-long love for experiential learning and emotional openness.
CBTeam was an ever-evolving idea spurred by passionate conversations over years while we all worked at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. CBTeam opened in Arlington in 2016 and began mainly as an option for clinicians to see clients in the unique therapeutic environment described above.
Exposure therapy, or the act of engaging fully in valued-activities in order to learn from real-life experience (versus the stories we tell ourselves), is at the core of our clinical work as it embodies these values of experiential learning, openness to all emotional experiences, and acceptance of imperfection and failure. As opposed to a sterile, white-coat medical experience, we hope CBTeam feels like an extension of your own home, fosters real relationships with our expert clinicians that are based on compassion and vulnerability, and fosters a life-long love for experiential learning and emotional openness.
CBTeam was an ever-evolving idea spurred by passionate conversations over years while we all worked at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. CBTeam opened in Arlington in 2016 and began mainly as an option for clinicians to see clients in the unique therapeutic environment described above.
We realized that what started as a small business was turning into something more as fantastic clinical work was being accomplished and our staff size continued to grow. The feedback from our clinicians was that we had created an environment where not only could transformative clinical work happen, but also a place where clinicians felt emotionally supported and allowed to pursue career interests organically, connected as humans not just as professionals, and encouraged to have a work-life balance that greatly limits burn-out.
Since 2016, our staff has grown such that we have relocated our Behavioral Health Clinic to a newly built 14 office clinic in Lexington, Massachusetts and have greatly expanded the clinical services we offer to provide a more comprehensive clinical care that matches the needs of each client.
On a typical day you will find families connecting over coffee in our various comfortable open spaces (yes the coffee is very good!), staff working collaboratively within the office and outside the office as we help our clients engage in brave and rewarding exposure work, graduate clinicians knocking on our doors to discuss a case they are helping with, staff debating the utility of a recent scientific publication, siblings playing in our spacious kids area, and therapy dogs roaming the halls from time to time. These “typical” days give us the fulfillment and satisfaction that we were searching for during our previous professional endeavors. We hope to see you around CBTeam soon, please don’t hesitate to introduce yourself and say hi!
Our orgin story is a winding one and naturally our path forward will be the same.
With gratitude,
Jason Elias, Kim Smith, and Adam Reid