Approach & Services
Counselling
Counselling is a process of working together to figure out what’s creating your symptoms (e.g., anxiety, low mood) and then working to resolve them. Some examples of what people focus on in treatment include:
Developing new ways of coping with anxiety
Challenging negative self talk that makes you anxious and depressed
Resolving conflicted feelings, such as being able to feel healthy anger and be assertive with those you love
Working through past traumatic experiences and increasing your current sense of safety and calm
Grieving past painful experiences and losses
How I work
Since people have different reasons for coming to therapy, how we work together will depend on what it is you need help with.
Some of our work will focus on how you think and behave (an approach called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT). Changing the way you think and making concrete behavioral changes can often result in significant benefits. I believe that for most people to make the changes they want, therapy also needs to focus on addressing the emotions that cause anxiety, symptoms, and understandably tend to be avoided. Therefore, beyond talking about your thoughts, our work will focus on helping you experientially work through the feelings that are causing you to be anxious and stuck. I will give very specific feedback regarding the mechanisms that keep you stuck, to empower you to see them on your own so that you can change. This kind of counselling is called Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy.
In order to make sure we use our time together as effectively as possible, we will look at specific examples of what is causing you distress so that we can get a very clear sense of the problem. I find that working this way helps people get better more quickly. Most people have a clear sense within a few sessions if we’re on the right track, so you don’t have to wait a long time to know that therapy is working.
The Benefit
After participating in counselling, people often experience feeling calmer, happier, and are better at coping. People describe being able to experience their feelings without getting anxious or overwhelmed by them. People also describe feeling better about themselves, and being able to experience others more accurately and having more satisfying relationships. Ultimately we are working to help you change the way you relate to your feelings, so that after therapy, when symptoms like anxiety or worry come up, they are no longer confusing and seemingly random and you can work through them on your own.