Andrew Nichols
M.S.W., L.C.S.W.
Clinical Social Worker/Therapist
Wheaton, USA
Answers questions in Addictions · Adolescent Issues · Anxiety
About Andrew Nichols
I am a psychotherapist in private practice in the Western Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. I have been actively in practice since 1995.
What I do
I work with adolescents and adults in individual, couples, and family therapy. I practice using a transdiagnostic form of cognitive-behavioral therapy focused on resolution of internal conflicts that underly stress, anxiety, and depression.
My story
I am a psychotherapist in private practice in the Western Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. I have been actively in practice since 1995.
Why life is worth living
Things can change for the better, and we are all in this together!
Treatment Offered
Specialties
Therapy approaches
Patient population
Modalities
Answered Questions(3)
Tackling sleep problems
I have clinical anxiety and I was medicated on a swath of anxiolytics for more than 20 years. I am not going back to that hell. Now I am 36 days straight after more than 10 years of pretty much daily cannabis. I expected to feel a lot better after quitting and I do feel a lot sharper and more able to remember things. The one concern I have is that I am having sleeping problems. I can fall asleep without a lot of difficulty now (though it was hard at the start) but every night I wake up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. They are not always nightmares but they usually are and they always leave me feeling unsettled. I do not know what to do. I cannot and will not touch sleeping pills of any kind. I have tried drinking alcohol to knock myself out so I won’t have nightmares but this just seems to delay them to the early morning. And then I am hung over too. Can you give me any advice on how to minimize this problem I am having?
Read answer →Time for tough choices
I have a good friend who is 68 and who lives alone with her middle aged daughter. Her daughter is bedridden with a number of debilitative pain conditions. I do not know all of her health concerns but I know she has had fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease for a long time. The daughter seemed to be managing ok for a while but things have gotten much worse for her over the last couple of years and she is in a lot of pain all of the time and relies on her mother for all of her care. My friend has called an ambulance twice in the last year when things got more than she could handle but the hospital will always just send her back home after stabilizing things because they say there is nothing they can do for her in a hospital that is different than the care she can get at home. This is very sad and it is very hard on a mother to see her daughter like this. But I am more concerned about my friend. She is elderly and not in great health herself but she is on call 24 hours a day to care for her daughter who needs her all of the time. She can no longer attend outside social gatherings because she needs to take care of her daughter and when I go over to visit her at home I can see that the daughter treats her terribly. She yells and screams to get things and calls my friend really horrible names. My friend says she gets like this, abusive, when the pain is bad, which is much of the time. My friend is just overwhelmed but she just doesn’t know what to do. Her daughter has nowhere else to go. I am worried that my friend is in danger from the stress and the constant abuse and it just doesn’t seem right to me. I want to be able to offer her some good advice on what to do but I just can’t think of any to give her. It is hard to feel very sympathetic to the daughter because she is so nasty but I guess she is a lot of pain. I want to help but what can I do and it seems like as much as anyone does to help the daughter she always wants more and more. I don’t think there is any answer here but I thought I would write to you in case you had some professional expertise and advice that was not obvious to me. Thank you for reading my concerns.
Read answer →Getting unstuck
I live with three people I don’t really like. I don’t really have any other place I can afford. And they are also pretty much my only friends. I thought I liked them and I thought my life was pretty good but then I stopped smoking weed a couple of weeks ago and my friends did not and now that I am looking at things with a clear head (I was wake and bake and then go all day for 8 years – no job I am on disability) I can see that we are all losers and the only thing we really have in common is getting high all the time. It turns out that when you’re not high, playing video games and looking at porn all day don’t really add up to a satisfying existence. Now the problem is it is so depressing that the only thing I can think to do is get high. When you have no friends and no money and no skills and no social skills and aren’t good looking or interesting and disabled and not real mobile…how can you even start changing your life? I feel stuck and if I don’t get unstuck soon I know I am going to go back to my old ways. What should I do?
Read answer →