Our Story

Harp Counseling was established in 2017 by the owner, Julia Dawoud. As a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Julia’s goal has always been to serve the community by bringing mental health awareness, fostering a community of support around mental illness, and making sure individuals have access to mental health treatment via Harp or another appropriate level of care.

Harp Counseling provides services to teens and their families, young adults, and working professionals going through a variety of mental health challenges. These challenges include anxiety, depression, trauma, relationship issues, addiction, and more. We offer our services to individuals from all cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.

About Julia Dawoud

Julia Dawoud is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) and Qualified Supervisor in the state of Florida. She has over ten years of clinical counseling experience working in a variety of settings including outpatient, residential, therapeutic schools, and high schools. She has been in private practice for over five years, providing individual, family, and couples therapy. Julia is certified in advanced cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and integrates elements of CBT, psychodynamic, solution-focused, and motivational interviewing approaches to the treatment of each client. Julia is highly experienced working with clients experiencing anxiety, depression and other mood disorders, trauma, relationship issues, and substance abuse.

A Holistic Approach

If you or a loved one are committed to individual counseling, it makes sense to address the whole person. In fact, to make significant progress, I believe patients must address three different aspects of their being:

MIND

Your thoughts affect your emotions and your behaviors. When you work with one of our clinicians, you will work directly on the mind. First understanding the schemas that have been established from your history through learned behavior, then working on restructuring and reframing your thoughts to align with what changes you would like to make in the present day.

BODY

Our bodies can often times be the teller of what is wrong with our psyche. As a result, we believe that activities such as meditation, prayer, running, and hobbies like painting all, engage your body in a healthy, integrated way so as to address the physical/somatic manifestations of our mental health. We encourage you to find whatever body-engaging activity makes sense for you during our time together.

SOUL

Harp Counseling was founded by providers with a Christian world view, and as a result, we cannot emphasize enough our strong belief that a spiritual center is a necessary foundation in an individuals life. Whether you are deeply religious or an avowed atheist, everyone has some form of spiritual life that can form an important touchstone in their personal progress. Whether prayer, meditation, or simply a walk in nature appeal most to you, we will encourage you to find a spiritual center in your life.

How does counseling work exactly?

1) We begin with an assessment over our first 1-2 sessions, whose purpose is to identify the presenting problem(s) and any relevant history that may have affected them. It is during this time frame that a full bio-psychosocial evaluation will be conducted on an as-needed basis.

2) Once the assessment is complete, we develop an informal treatment plan to determine our goals for subsequent sessions. Typically we develop 1-3 realistic, time-bound goals for the coming weeks or months.

3) During the treatment phase of therapy, goals are addressed in steps through various modalities at your desired pace.

4) Over time, we conduct a reassessment to determine if services need to continue, increase, or decrease frequency, or if we need to change the approach altogether.

A typical patient experience lasts 3-6 months, reassessing as needed, as patients make their journey toward a more independent, functioning, stable life. However, it is also common to return months or years down the road if a trigger resurfaces.

Above all, my services are holistic and solution focused, utilizing CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) techniques while gently guiding and challenging patients to make progress in their lives with regular check-ins to ensure a satisfactory therapy experience.