Dr. Tim Paquette, PhD

A doctoral psychologist with two decades of clinical practice

What Dr. Paquette treats

Tim is one of the practice’s designated ERP specialists for OCD and, with Dr. Joe Gryzbek, leads psychological testing and ADHD evaluations. His broader caseload spans anxiety, depression, trauma, couples, family, and identity-and-transition work.

How Tim works clinically

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) for OCD

ERP is the gold-standard, research-backed treatment for OCD. Tim is one of two clinicians at Gryzbek — alongside Dr. Joe Gryzbek — trained to deliver structured ERP protocols for adults working with obsessions and compulsions. The work involves graduated exposure to obsessive triggers paired with response prevention, building tolerance for uncertainty over time.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

For anxiety, depression, and related concerns, Tim uses cognitive-behavioral protocols that identify the thinking patterns and behavioral loops keeping the problem in place — then build new responses through structured between-session practice.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

ACT pairs values-clarification with psychological flexibility work. It’s especially useful when the goal isn’t symptom elimination but moving toward what matters even when difficult internal experiences are present. Tim weaves ACT into anxiety, depression, and identity-and-transition work.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for trauma

CPT is an evidence-based trauma protocol — one of the EMDR-alternative approaches the practice is positioned around. Tim uses CPT for trauma work with adults who prefer or respond better to cognitively-oriented processing rather than reprocessing-based methods.

Behavioral activation + attachment-based work

For depression and motivational shutdown, behavioral activation rebuilds engagement with the things that historically generated meaning. For relational and identity work, an attachment-based lens connects early relationship patterns to current ways of coping — without making the past the whole conversation.

Populations served

Insurance, sessions, and how to work with Tim

How Dr. Paquette thinks about the work

Tim brings over twenty years of clinical experience to Gryzbek Therapy, with the bulk of those years spent at Northern Illinois University’s Counseling and Consultation Services — a high-volume university setting he joined in 2004 and where he eventually served as Assistant Director and then Director. That tenure shaped a working style that’s structured but adaptive, evidence-based but relationally grounded, and slow to assume what any one person’s situation actually is.

“The work starts with the relationship I build with each person — one that focuses on their specific concerns, experiences, perspectives, and the identities they carry into the room.”

His clinical interests cluster around anxiety and OCD, depression, grief and loss, men’s issues, and relational concerns — with a particular emphasis on the communication patterns that drive how people stay close to (or pull away from) the people who matter to them. He sees past relationship experiences as inputs into current coping rather than as the whole explanation, which keeps the work practical: what’s the pattern, where did it come from, and what do we do with it now.

Tim’s ERP training is the practice’s anchor for OCD. ERP is a structured, exposure-based protocol with strong outcome research, and it requires a clinician who’s done the methodology. Tim has, and he and Dr. Joe Gryzbek are the two clinicians at the practice carrying OCD referrals. For trauma work, he uses Cognitive Processing Therapy — one of the evidence-based, non-EMDR protocols the practice is built around. For anxiety, he runs CBT and ACT in combination, calibrating the mix to whether the goal is restructuring catastrophic thinking, building tolerance for uncertainty, or moving toward what matters when avoidance has shrunk the life around the problem.

“Therapy is a place where increased self-awareness gets put into practice. The insights only matter when they show up in how someone responds to their actual life.”

Alongside therapy, Tim handles psychological testing and ADHD evaluations with Dr. Gryzbek. Testing isn’t therapy — it’s an assessment that produces a written report, typically within about a month. The reason the practice keeps testing inside the doctoral tier is practical: standardized administration and interpretation of cognitive, personality, and ADHD measures require extended training in the test protocols themselves. Tim’s PhD in Counseling Psychology from Purdue University (2005) included a dissertation — Ego strength, White racial identity, racial diversity attitudes, and cultural empathy in undergraduate students — that anchored his early research interest in how identity, difference, and ego development shape the work clients bring into the room. That assessment-and-research grounding informs how he runs testing today.

Outside of clinical work, Tim is married with two adult children and structures family time around shared meals and storytelling. He spends weekends on landscaping and yard work, listens to music across genres — he’ll travel for live shows — and remains a long-time, opinionated movie watcher. None of that determines what happens in session, but it’s the texture a client tends to want when they’re deciding whether the person on the other side of the room is somebody they can talk to.

External profiles & directories

• LinkedIn
• Psychology Today
• Zocdoc
• APA Directory
• IDFPR License Lookup Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation — verify license
• NPI Registry National Plan & Provider Enumeration — npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov