Dr. Tessa Salisbury earned her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from the APA-accredited program at Brigham Young University where she chose to focus on children, adolescents and families. As part of her doctoral training, Dr. Salisbury completed an APA-accredited pre-doctoral internship at Wasatch Mental Health, a community mental health center. After graduating with her doctorate, Dr. Salisbury decided to pursue further training and completed a post-doc also at Wasatch Mental Health where she specialized in psychological assessment. Dr. Salisbury earned her bachelor’s degrees in psychology and sociology from Southern Utah University, graduating Summa Cum Laude.
Tessa has worked with children, adolescents, and adults in a variety of settings. In addition to the community mental health center she completed her internship at, Dr. Salisbury has also spent the past several years working in residential treatment facilities, a university counseling center, a community outpatient clinic, and a pediatric practice.
Dr. Salisbury is comfortable working with a wide range of mental health concerns including depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and behavior disorders. She has excellent group therapy experience and has lead a variety of therapy groups including parenting groups, social skills groups for children on the autism spectrum, as well as substance abuse and emotion regulation groups for teenagers. Since beginning her clinical training, Dr. Salisbury has had the opportunity to work with sexual minorities. Over the years her passion for this population has grown and she has been focusing on receiving additional training to better help her serve this population.
In addition to therapy, Dr. Salisbury has extensive experience and is passionate about psychological testing. She is comfortable performing a wide variety of tests including intellectual, achievement, and neuropsychological. Additionally, Dr. Salisbury has been trained to conduct psychosexual behavioral risk assessments as well as autism evaluations.
While clinical work is what Dr. Salisbury is most passionate about, she does have experience teaching a variety of courses at Brigham Young University. These courses have included introduction to psychology, abnormal psychology, and child psychopathology. She also has good research experience. Her dissertation focused on comparing a clinician’s ability to predict treatment failure to an actuarial method’s ability to do the same.
Dr. Salisbury joined Children and Adolescent Treatment Specialists in December 2015. Creating a safe, genuine, accepting, and nonjudgemental environment is very important to her. When it comes to an individual’s capacity for growth and change she believes Helen Keller stated it best when she said…”Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” Using empirically validated treatments in order to ensure clients receive the best treatment for their presenting concerns is important to her as well. The treatments employed by Dr. Salisbury come primarily from the following therapies: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy, and Person-Centered Therapy.
Outside of her work, Dr. Salisbury enjoys running, reading, cooking, baking, hiking, and traveling. She feels happiest when she is with her family.