Services
Anxiety
Counselling for anxiety can help you find relief from worry, overthinking, and the exhausting (and futile) effort of trying to control the future. Human beings don’t do well with uncertainty for very long yet there’s a lot of uncertainty in life. In therapy we focus on how to stop trying to control the uncontrollable and live a good life anyway.
Depression
Therapy for depression can help to lift the sadness and lack of vitality that are robbing you of the fullness of your life. Sometimes the reasons for depression are obvious, but sometimes not. Instead it can feel as if depression just came over you and now you’re feeling unmotivated, unhappy, and lost. One approach to therapy for depression is to start with this definition: Suppression + Lack of Expression = Depression. In counselling you can give voice to your unspoken feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. As you discover what’s weighing you down, a shift can begin.
Trauma
Trauma therapy supports adults in recovering from devastating experiences that continue to affect their daily life, relationships, and sense of safety. Disasters happen to all of us. A small thing can have a big effect on one person, and a big thing can have a small effect on someone else. There’s no comparison and no blame, we’re all different. The only thing that matters is how you are being affected and what could make a difference so that time starts to move again and your life becomes less restricted by your past.
Relationship and Couples Counselling
Couples counselling can help you and your partner(s) communicate more clearly around repeating patterns, issues of trust and respect, and other hurts and frustrations in your relationship. What repair is needed so that loving and authentic relating is possible? In relationship counselling we’ll inquire into what goes on between you that makes your connection with each other trusting and loving or dangerous and traumatic. Often, unresolved childhood issues get in the way of you seeing each other. With greater clarity about what’s really going on between you, and who you’re really talking to (your father? your grandmother?), we can identify who’s intruding into your relationship and show them the door until it’s only the two of you in your relationship.
“Love is possible only if the people involved communicate with each other from the centre of their existence”—Eric Fromm
Grief
Counselling can be of support to you in your grief as you live through the death of someone you love, or navigate the loss of a relationship, your health, a pet, or an identity. Grief can leave you feeling staggered and disoriented, not sure how to carry on. There are some losses that are old and this might be the first time you’ve allowed yourself to more fully express your feelings. In the company of a therapist who doesn’t hurry you toward a mythical closure, or to get over it and move on, you can express your loss, and in time, recognize its place in the larger story of your life.
Abuse
Counselling for abuse starts with establishing safety and trust. If you don’t feel safe in your own body you can’t feel safe anywhere, and it takes as long as it takes to feel safe within yourself and with others. Because you were hurt in relationship, it’s only in relationship that you can heal. This can be an uncomfortable realization if one of your strategies for keeping yourself safe has been to isolate. That creates other problems though, like loneliness and disconnection from community. What would be different now is that in the presence of a compassionate and respectful therapist you might choose to risk, in your own time, speaking about what was done to you and by whom. I would accompany and support you to face the pain and injustice of your past.
Stress
Finding relief from stress is an important life skill that therapy can support you to develop. When faced with too much stress we have only three options: fight effectively, flee effectively, or seek effective protection—otherwise we make ourselves sick. In counselling you can examine where and how you’re feeling overburdened and trapped, your habitual ways of handling stress, and what needs to change so that you feel relief.
“It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it”—Hans Selye.
Self-esteem
Feeling not good enough, being excessively hard on yourself, perfectionism, shame – these can leave you doubting that you’re worthy of respect and love. Examining old patterns and mistaken ideas can help you realize the truth that you are lovable, without reservation.
Insomnia
Therapy for insomnia can support you to get a better night’s sleep. You might have already used practical strategies like keeping your bedroom cool or not checking the time if you wake up during the night. But you can’t try to sleep, you can only allow for its possibility because sleep occurs in the direction of relaxing and letting go—it’s not something that you can will. When unfinished emotional business from your life is keeping you awake and ruminating, addressing these concerns can lead toward relief and more peaceful nights.
Chronic Unhappiness
Something feels perpetually off, a pervasive sorrow and frustration that you can’t seem to shake. Disappointment, feeling forsaken, being stuck playing a role vs. living and relating authentically, unmetabolized trauma—these are some of the things that can lead to chronic unhappiness. Therapy offers a way to inquire into your unhappiness, asking what grief, broken-heartedness, or injustice has you in its grip and what could allow you to free yourself.
Loneliness and Isolation
Time doesn’t heal all wounds. When loneliness and isolation are longstanding issues, it’s often because the need to feel safe overrides everything else. Even desiring connection with others, the terror of being hurt (again) might trump our willingness to risk trusting anyone. It’s possible to practise and develop courage, little by little.