About Me
Hello! I’m Dr. Caroline Prouvost. You can call me Caroline. I have spent nearly a decade working with individuals to reclaim their lives from anxiety, trauma, OCD and chronic pain. Being human is hard! Sometimes what makes it even harder is feeling like we can’t turn to anyone for help. So much of the time when we interact with others we only get to see the surface level. I am so grateful that I have been given the privilege of fully seeing others. This is the true gift of therapy: to be fully seen, understood and accepted just as you are.
As a psychotherapist, my style is one of compassion, curiosity, and humor. There’s a reason you’ve been stuck in the cycles you have been. I take the time to help you understand what your current responses provide and help you take steps to intentionally change your behaviors to get even more out of life. To move from responding out of fear to responding out of what is most important to you.
I am very lucky that my work provides a great deal of meaning to me. When I’m not at work you’ll often find me at my home in Orange County spending time with my husband, son, and two rambunctious dogs. I also love nerding out on different tabletop games, movies, TV shows and books.
Clinical Background
I have obtained my clinical knowledge from a number of sources in my life. Most notably it comes from the people I’ve gotten to work with throughout my years providing therapy. Clients who have been vulnerable and allowed me to help them through some of the darkest points in their lives.
Before I was able to walk that path, like many other Psychologists, I spent a great deal of time learning about the basics of Psychology, starting by studying cognitive biases underlying various anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders and receiving my Bachelors from UCSD. While attending Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (formerly the Chicago Medical School) for my Masters and Doctorate I specialized in research regarding Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum disorders and learned how to facilitate high quality exposure therapy for a variety of anxiety disorders including, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Social Anxiety Disorder, Specific Phobia, Panic Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Hoarding. I also gained a great deal of clinical experience in providing a specific type of exposure therapy, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) before receiving my doctorate in Clinical Psychology. You can find a list of my research publications here.
I also gained much of my clinical knowledge at the VA, having completed my Internship in Outpatient Mental Health and my Post-Doctoral training in Interprofessional Integrative Health there. At that time I specialized in providing Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC), and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for PTSD. I then went on to work for more than seven years as a Psychologist at the Long Beach VA, completing certifications in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Depression and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Chronic Pain.
