Unlock Your Potential TO HEAL, RECOVER, AND RADIATE
Individual Counselling and Self-Compassion
Through individual counselling, we address a range of topics such as unpacking trauma experiences, understanding the role of attachment and the neurobiology of trauma, recognizing and regulating emotions, navigating through relational discourse, recognizing the importance of self-care, and managing your overall health and wellness by cultivating self-compassion. The goal of our therapy sessions together will be to help you develop the mental fortitude needed to heal, achieve personal growth, and enhance your well-being. Working on developing self-compassion will allow you to move more easily through difficult times in the future, as wells as attain a sense of inner peace and empowerment to advocate for your well being.
Anxiety Counselling
The anxiety counselling services we offer are designed to help you overcome fear, stress, and anxiety. Clients are provided a supportive and non-judgmental environment where they can explore their thoughts and feelings, gain insights into their behaviour, and develop strategies to manage their anxiety. Anxiety can be debilitating and disruptive leaving an individual feeling confused, vulnerable, and frustrated. Although experiencing a certain level anxiety is natural and an adaptive response in our nervous system to keep us safe, it becomes maladaptive when in overdrive. Understanding the neurobiology behind anxiety and the events that trigger it is critical to treatment. Therapy include|s a deep exploration of how anxiety developed, how it is keeping you safe, and coping strategies that may be useful to manage high levels of anxiety. Psychoeducation on the neurobiology behind the stress response provides a deep understanding of how stress impacts the nervous system. In our sessions, I will support you in exploring your thoughts, emotions such as fear, sadness, and anger as well as triggers that lead to heightened levels of anxiety. Exploring earlier experiences and trauma that may have led to the development of negative beliefs and may be fueling negative automatic thoughts can help determine the root cause of anxiety to break dysfunctional thinking patterns. When dealing with anxiety, improving one’s self-concept and self efficacy can be an empowering and liberating process
Depression Counselling
The depression counselling services we provide are rooted mainly in CBT, ACT, and an understanding of polyvagal theory. With CBT, therapy can help you overcome feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and despair. We provide a supportive and non-judgmental environment where you can explore your thoughts and feelings, gain insights into your behaviour, and develop strategies to manage your depression. Therapy focuses on identifying and breaking cognitive patterns that fuel negative thinking with an integrative and holistic approach to target emotional, psychological, physiological, social, behavioural, and motivational factors that contribute to depressive symptoms. Behavioural activation, reframing negative thinking, and engaging in healthy living are integral to treatment. Using polyvagael theory, depression is perceived as a biological defense strategy or survival-based shutdown response due to the autonomic nervous system being in overdrive. Symptoms are characterized as immobilization, withdrawal, and a sense of hopelessness and impeding doom. Somatic experiencing and mindfulness-based interventions may be introduced to help the nervous system achieve a homeostatic state by providing cues of safety and stability. ACT therapy has also shown effectivness in reducing depressive symptoms by fostering psychological flexibility through acceptance of negative thoughts and feelings as transient mental events and committing to making choices that aligns with one's values and prioritizes personal goals that bring a sense of meaning and purpose. Overall, counselling sessoins focus on treating depression by aiming to acknowledge negative thoughts, implement lifestyle changes, tap into motivation to to set and achieve goals, and build a sense of accomplishment and a positive mindset through consistency and effort.
Empowering You to ENGAGE IN self-discovery AND GROWth
Journey of Self-Discovery
Counselling can support you to embark on a journey of self-discovery where you can unpack your experiences and explore your thoughts and feelings without judgement. We derive a sense of meaning and fulfillment in engaging in conversations that explore the significance of past experiences and their impact on one’s growth and life trajectory. This is a sphere that holds valuable potential for remediating your understanding of yourself and your purpose in life. The journey of self-discovery focuses on understanding your own identity and standing in your own truth. Our understanding is that we prefer to see situations as black or white but much of life happens in the gray. Navigating the gray can be tough, leaving you feeling trapped and alone. This is a challenging process that requires you to navigate through your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, morals, values, and difficult experiences. Working on self-discovery challenges you to allow deeper emotions and experiences that may be repressed to come to the surface so they can be acknowledged and brought into your awareness with self-compassion and self-acceptance. Sometimes trauma experiences can leave imprints that stunt your growth and ability to connect with yourself. As you work towards removing all barriers that question your authenticity, you may uncover your own truth by reconnecting with yourself and revitalizing your potential. The process of healing and self-discovery may be deeply associated with uncovering your sense of purpose or simply with developing the ability to exist in harmony with the elements.
Self-Esteem
Our sessions are focused on building a sense of self, targeting self-worth, and boosting your confidence. Building self-efficacy is a building block to developing a positive mindset which supports the generation of a positive self-concept and the capacity to access inner wisdom. Therapy uses a CBT framework and CBT-based interventions to build a sense of empowerment, positivity, and self-efficacy. Reframing negative beliefs and exploring attachment wounds are an integral component of treatment. Exploring one's perception of their attributes and qualities that define them while recognizing strengths and weaknesses through self-reflection and awareness are core aspects of developing a positive sense of self. Repairing self-esteem may also require healing past trauma and changing deeply-rooted beliefs about one's self and feeling empowered to be independent and build positive relationships. Shadow work can also bring deeper insight into allowing the repressed parts of yourself due to shame, trauma, or fear of judgement come forward and be integrated into your conscious with awareness. The process may require unraveling deeper emtions and experiences such as anger, jealousy, guilt, resentment, and past failures. By bringing some of these undesirable and uncomfortable parts to light, we can explore their purpose and reframe them so you can accept parts of your personality with compassion and understanding. This can open new perspectives that can be explored resulting in increased inner strength, self-compassion, and authenticity, ultimately boosting your self-worth.
Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection - Dr. Gabor Mate
