Real talk about counselling in Edmonton. When anxiety takes over, it completely sucks. Perhaps it has hooked you and moved you away from living your best life. Maybe it has led you to question whether you are good enough, despite all of your best efforts. Perhaps it has shown up for you as perfectionism, and brought with it this intense fear of making mistakes. Maybe anxiety has made you to feel small, forcing you to ignore your own needs out of fear that others in your life will leave you or judge you. Perhaps it has made you to feel out of touch with yourself and your reality, resulting in an intense hopelessness.
I get it. You were going about your business and *whoosh* all of a sudden anxiety showed up. This new sensation that made your brain race with a million “what ifs”, followed by feelings of intense fear and dread, and countless physical sensations like a rapid heart beat, breathlessness, nausea, and fuzziness, to name a few. Ugh. What a hassle.
So, what now? How do you possibly go about your life when these *whooshes* keep happening?
That’s where I come in. I have helped many clients, just like yourself, unhook from anxiety and cultivate a life in which they are more present, unafraid to make mistakes and get messy, able to share their needs openly with others, and freely embrace who they are with both love and compassion. I hope for all of these things for you too.
So, if you’re ready to make peace with anxiety and start living your best life, let’s do this.
Although I like to think I chose to specialize in anxiety, it feels very much like anxiety chose me. As someone who was once hooked by anxiety too, I can relate to the struggles it causes.
I’m looking forward to getting to know you and to learn more about your personal journey with anxiety.
New to therapy? Wondering what to expect? Here are some of the modalities that I love to use to help you on your healing journey:
I work almost exclusively from the framework of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, which encourages clients to accept those things they don’t have control over and take committed action in areas in which they do. ACT encourages clients to explore their values and continually ask themselves if their actions are moving them away from or towards the life they would like to live. ACT is especially helpful in the treatment of anxiety.
Every so often I will sprinkle a bit of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) into session, to help establish the ever-so-important connection between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. I like to mix it with a bit of somatic experiencing, as it’s essential to also account for the physical sensations that client’s experience and how they also contribute to client behaviour.
Lastly, when working with individuals in the area of trauma, I employ Internal Family Systems (IFS), which explores the different parts of a client and how they work to protect them. It can often be seen that many of the actions which may now be counterintuitive to the client were at one time extremely helpful for survival. This involves directly speaking to and working with these parts of clients.
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