Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety

TYPES OF TRAUMA

Trauma doesn’t only affect what we remember—it can change how the brain and nervous system respond to stress, relationships, perceived threat, and everyday life.

When the nervous system has learned to stay prepared for danger, people may experience hypervigilance, avoidance, emotional dysregulation, anxiety, intrusive memories, difficulty trusting others, or feeling “stuck” in patterns that once helped them survive. Effective trauma treatment isn’t simply about talking through what happened. It’s about helping the brain and body develop safer, more adaptive ways of responding in the present.

At Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety, a specialized program of Beachside Behavioral Health Services, our structured daily outpatient programming provides individualized, multidisciplinary treatment designed around the person—not just the diagnosis. Treatment integrates evidence-based approaches including EMDR, DBT, behavioral activation, psychoeducation, emotional-regulation work, art therapy, family/parent support, case management, and medication-management coordination when appropriate.

This combination allows us to address trauma from multiple directions—processing traumatic experiences, strengthening regulation and coping abilities, improving relationships and daily functioning, and helping patients gradually reconnect with healthy activities, supports, and their community.

The goal isn’t to erase someone’s story. It’s to reduce the power trauma continues to have over the next chapter.

🌊 Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety
Rewrite Your Story.
BeachsideBHS.com
(321)977-4041

🧠 HOW TRAUMA FUELS ANXIETY — AND HOW WE HELP

Trauma can change how the brain responds to perceived threat. When the nervous system becomes conditioned to expect danger, the brain may remain on high alert—even when the person is objectively safe. Over time, this can contribute to hypervigilance, avoidance, emotional dysregulation, sleep disruption, and persistent anxiety.

At Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety, a specialized program of Beachside Behavioral Health, our programming is designed to help interrupt that cycle.

Through daily, evidence-based programming, our multidisciplinary team integrates DBT, EMDR, behavioral activation, art-based interventions, psychoeducation, family support, and medication management when clinically appropriate to help patients:

🖤 Better regulate emotions and physiological arousal
🧠 Process traumatic memories rather than continually react to them
🌊 Reduce avoidance and build tolerance for difficult emotions
💪 Practice new responses to stress in real-world environments
🤝 Strengthen relationships, connection, and support

The brain learns from experience—and with consistent, targeted treatment, new patterns can be learned too.

Understand. Heal. Move Forward.

🌊 Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety, a specialized program of Beachside Behavioral Health.
Rewrite Your Story.
BeachsideBHS.com

🥊 BEHAVIORAL ACTIVATION | MOVE. ENGAGE. FEEL BETTER.

At Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety, we intentionally incorporate experiences that give patients opportunities to practice therapeutic concepts through meaningful, real-world activity.

Behavioral Activation is an evidence-based intervention that increases engagement in rewarding, values-based activities to reduce avoidance, improve mood, and strengthen daily functioning. Physical activity can be an important part of that process.

This week, our Behavioral Activation Group stepped into the boxing gym. 🥊 Boxing combines movement, focus, challenge, mastery, and connection—creating opportunities to practice emotional regulation, build self-efficacy, reduce stress, and experience accomplishment in real time.

For our patients, the goal isn’t learning how to fight. It’s learning that they can do hard things.

A huge thank you to our community partners at The Cycle Studio and Classen Boxing for supporting our patients, our programming, and mental health in our community. 🖤

Real activities. Real connection. Real progress.

🌊 Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety
A specialized program of Beachside Behavioral Health Services
BeachsideBHS.com
(321)978-4041

📱 KNOW THE APPS

Our kids are growing up in a world where their social lives, friendships, entertainment, and communication increasingly happen online.

Technology itself isn’t the enemy. But access without awareness can expose children and adolescents to cyberbullying, inappropriate content, adults posing as peers, unsafe messaging, location sharing, hidden accounts, and conversations parents may never know are happening.

At Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety we believe protecting a child’s mental health requires understanding the environments they spend time in — including the digital ones.

The goal isn’t simply taking phones away or banning every app. It’s staying involved.

Talk with your kids. Know what they’re downloading. Understand who they’re communicating with. Discuss privacy, boundaries, healthy relationships, and what to do when something online makes them uncomfortable.

Most importantly, create the kind of relationship where they know they can come to you before a problem becomes a crisis.

Mental health prevention starts with connection, education, and conversations at home.

🌊 Clinical Excellence | Community Centered | Patient Driven
BeachsideBHS.com

🌊 TRUE DBT PROGRAMMING
Practical Tools. Real Change. Greater Emotional Resilience.

At Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety, a specialized program of Beachside Behavioral Health Services, DBT is more than a weekly therapy session. Our daily programming uses a multidisciplinary approach to help patients understand the patterns behind their behaviors while developing healthier ways to regulate emotions, navigate relationships, tolerate distress, and function successfully in everyday life.

Developmental trauma, attachment disruption, chronic invalidation, and instability can shape survival-based behaviors. DBT helps patients understand these patterns while balancing acceptance of where they are with meaningful behavioral change.

🖤 ADULT PROGRAMMING: For adults, longstanding trauma-related, emotional, interpersonal, and personality patterns—including Cluster B traits—may already be deeply established. Our goals are comprehensive evaluation and diagnostic clarity, stabilization of mood and behavior, psychoeducation, reduction of self-defeating behaviors, improved emotional regulation and relationships, safety and relapse prevention, appropriate community functioning, and sustainable overall wellness.

🖤 ADOLESCENT PROGRAMMING: Adolescence provides an important window for earlier intervention while emotional regulation, impulse control, identity, relationships, and decision-making continue developing. Our goals are to interrupt self-defeating and maladaptive behaviors before they become increasingly established, strengthen emotional regulation and healthy coping, improve relationships and decision-making, support family, academic and social functioning, and promote long-term holistic wellness.

Our multidisciplinary program integrates DBT with EMDR, art therapy, behavioral activation, family support, case management, academic case management, psychoeducational group, weekend support, and medication-management coordination as clinically appropriate. EMDR can address underlying traumatic experiences, art therapy expands opportunities for processing and expression, and behavioral activation takes treatment beyond the therapy room—building healthy routines, connection, confidence, and real-world functioning.

Trauma informs. Healing happens.
🖤 Rewrite Your Story.
🌊 BeachsideBHS.com

🌊 WELCOME TO THE TEAM

Alyssa Breznitsky, BA, GSBAI
Academic Case Management | Behavioral Interventions
Graduate Student Behavior Analyst Intern, Ohio State University
Enneagram 6

We’re excited to welcome Alyssa to Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety, where she joins our interdisciplinary team supporting children, adolescents, and families.

Alyssa brings more than 10 years of experience working with children in K–3 educational settings, with a background in early childhood development, classroom behavior, individualized academic support, and collaboration with families.

She earned her BS in Early Childhood Education from the University of Memphis and is currently pursuing her Master’s in Applied Behavior Analysis at The Ohio State University, where she is completing her graduate practicum and gaining supervised clinical experience working directly with patients.

At the Center, a primary focus of Alyssa’s role is Academic Case Management—helping bridge the gap between a child’s mental health, behavioral functioning, and success in the classroom. She works alongside our clinical team and families to identify academic barriers, strengthen organization and school-related skills, coordinate educational needs, and develop practical supports that can carry across treatment, home, and school environments.

Her graduate training in Applied Behavior Analysis adds another important layer to that work. Through behavior analysis and behavioral interventions, Alyssa helps our team better understand what may be driving or maintaining a behavior—not simply reacting to the behavior itself. This allows for more individualized strategies that support emotional, behavioral, developmental, and academic functioning.

Alyssa also serves as Program Manager for Beachside Applied Behavior Analysis, a specialized division of Beachside Behavioral Health Services, as we continue developing integrated behavioral services for children and families.

Her combination of more than a decade in the classroom and advanced graduate training gives her a unique perspective within the Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety: understanding that a child’s struggles at school are rarely isolated from their emotional health, environment, relationships, and behavioral needs.

As an Enneagram 6, Alyssa brings loyalty, dependability, thoughtfulness, and a strong commitment to the children and families she serves.

Outside of Beachside and graduate school, Alyssa loves spending time with her family, going to shows, wakeboarding, boating, working out, boxing, painting, and creating art. 🎨🌊

Welcome to Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety, Alyssa! 💙

🏄‍♂️ WELCOME TO THE TEAM, KEEGAN! 🌊

We’re incredibly excited to welcome Keegan Gregory to the Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety as our Team Rider | Adolescent Peer Support Specialist.

Keegan is an avid wakeboarder with aspirations of taking his riding to the professional level. But when we heard the story behind his passion for the sport—and the role wakeboarding played in his own mental health journey—we knew this needed to be about much more than sponsoring an athlete.

We first met Keegan through our community partner, Orlando Watersports Complex (OWC), who also supports our experiential Behavioral Activation programming within Beachside’s adolescent DBT program.

But Keegan’s story started well before we met him.

As a teenager, Keegan experienced an extremely traumatic event that left him navigating an incredibly painful and vulnerable period in his life. While struggling with his mental health and recognizing that something needed to change, he entered treatment with another valued community partner, Family First Adolescent Services.

It was during an experiential outing at Family First that Keegan discovered wakeboarding.

And something clicked.

“I used to beg my mom to take me to the wakepark when she came down for visits. It became my new obsession—a healthy one. Wakeboarding saved my life along with wanting to do the work. I wanted to work at Family First after I graduated and am interested in the mental health field.”

There’s something powerful about that story—and it fits deeply with what we teach adolescents through DBT.

Trauma treatment isn’t only about processing what happened. It’s also about helping young people develop the skills, relationships, confidence, and meaningful experiences that allow them to move forward.

Within DBT, we focus on mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Behavioral Activation gives adolescents opportunities to practice those skills in the real world through movement, healthy connection, challenge, mastery, and meaningful experiences.

Wakeboarding didn’t replace the difficult therapeutic work Keegan chose to do. It became a healthy outlet that supported that work and gave him something meaningful to move toward.

Today, Keegan wants to use his lived experience to support adolescents navigating their own trauma and mental health challenges.

As our Adolescent Peer Support Specialist, Keegan will work alongside our clinical team providing connection, encouragement, mentorship, and an authentic peer perspective within our adolescent DBT program and Behavioral Activation activities.

His role isn’t to be a therapist. It’s something different—and incredibly valuable.

Sometimes an adolescent needs someone beside them who can genuinely say, “I understand what it’s like to struggle. I accepted help. I did the work. And I found something worth moving toward.”

Peer support can make treatment feel more relatable, reinforce healthy coping and DBT skills, and help young people see that what happened to them does not have to define what comes next.

And if we can help Keegan chase his dream of going pro while he helps other adolescents discover their own healthy outlet, purpose, or passion?

That’s exactly the kind of community we want to build.

Welcome to the Beachside family, Keegan. We’re SO stoked to have you. 🤙🌊🏄‍♂️

Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety
A specialized program of Beachside Behavioral Health Services

Rewrite Your Story.

BeachsideBHS.com

Ride it out. Talk it out

This week for Behavioral Activation Group, we headed out to Orlando Watersports Complex (OWC) for a day on the water wakeboarding. 🌊🏄

Behavioral activation is about more than simply “staying busy.” It’s an evidence-based approach that helps people intentionally engage in meaningful, rewarding, and goal-directed activities—especially when anxiety, low mood, fear, or avoidance are telling them to withdraw.

Wakeboarding gave us an incredible opportunity to put that into practice while reinforcing the four core skill areas of DBT: Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness.

🧠 Mindfulness: Wakeboarding demands present-moment attention—body position, the pull of the cable, the board underneath you, and what’s directly ahead. It’s mindfulness in motion.

🔥 Distress Tolerance: Falling, managing frustration, getting back up, and trying again means experiencing discomfort without immediately escaping it.

🌊 Emotion Regulation: Behavioral activation reminds us that we don’t always have to wait until we feel ready to act. Activities that create movement, mastery, enjoyment, and accomplishment can interrupt avoidance and create positive reinforcement. Sometimes action comes first—and emotion begins to shift afterward.

🤝 Interpersonal Effectiveness: Asking for help, receiving instruction, communicating needs, encouraging each other, and celebrating progress all strengthen effective interpersonal behavior.

That’s what makes experiences like this so valuable: skills practiced in real life become more than concepts discussed in a group room. Participants get to approach instead of avoid, tolerate discomfort, build mastery, connect with others, and experience the reward of doing something challenging and meaningful.

A huge THANK YOU to Orlando Watersports Complex for investing in mental health in our community and helping us create experiences like this.

Special thanks to Daniel, Louis, Juan and the rest of the boys at OWC for getting us dialed in with boards and equipment—and a huge thank you to Hyperlite Wakeboards for the gear and support. 🤘

If you haven’t been to OWC and have been wanting to ride—or want to try a sick cable park—head out and see Daniel and the crew. or check them out at orlandowatersports.com The park is insane, and these guys are huge supporters of mental health in Central Florida. 🌴🌊

Talk it out. Ride it out. 🤙

Beachside Center for Trauma + Anxiety
A specialized program of Beachside Behavioral Health
🌎 BeachsideBHS.com
📞 (321)978-4041

📸 Taken and posted with individual written consent

Change doesn’t happen all at once—it happens one skill at a time.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is one of the most well-researched treatments for helping people manage overwhelming emotions, reduce impulsive behaviors, improve relationships, and build healthier ways of coping. Decades of research have shown that DBT can improve emotional regulation, decrease distress, and increase overall quality of life for individuals facing a wide range of mental health challenges.

The four core skill areas of DBT work together to help people:
🧠 Stay present through Mindfulness
💙 Get through difficult moments with Distress Tolerance
🌊 Understand and manage emotions with Emotion Regulation
🤝 Build healthier, more effective relationships through Interpersonal Effectiveness

These aren’t just concepts—they’re practical, evidence-based skills that can be learned, practiced, and applied in everyday life.

Whether you’re working through anxiety, trauma, depression, or simply looking for healthier ways to respond to life’s challenges, developing these skills can help you feel more confident, balanced, and resilient.

Every journey begins with a single step—and every new skill is another step toward creating the life you want.