Counselling Services
Individual Counselling
Before You Call
Realizing you might need help can be overwhelming. There are so many options out there for professional support that you could probably spend the better part of a day scrolling through Psychology Today and still never reach the bottom of the pile. And then there’s the daunting task of meeting someone for a session- what if they aren’t what you’re looking for and you’ve “wasted” an hour of your time, only to have to re-explain all again it to someone new?
Instead of getting lost in the search, let’s make this simple – reach out today, and let’s figure out together how I can support you.
How can I help?
To help you narrow down your search of finding “the one”, here are some of the things I can most certainly help you with:
- Trauma, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD)
- Borderline Personality Disorder
- Anxiety
- Panic
- Phobias
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
- Depression
- Suicidal Ideation and Self-Harm
- Addictions and Substance Use
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)
CBT is all about the relationship between our thoughts, feelings, and actions. It heavily emphasizes the benefits of challenging unhelpful thought patterns with various strategies (often called “cognitive restructuring”). It is especially beneficial for individuals with anxiety and depression, and can be useful for people who struggle with low self-esteem, eating disorders, substance use, or simply addressing those pesky thoughts that keep you feeling low.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
DBT was initially created to address borderline personality disorder- in fact, it is considered the gold standard of treatment for borderline. It centers around four modules: mindfulness (how to stay in the present moment), emotion regulation (learning about your emotions and how to handle them day-to-day), distress tolerance (how to survive a crisis without making it worse), and interpersonal effectiveness (how to improve communication). There are parts of DBT that anyone could benefit from, and it is becoming more widely used for the treatment of a variety of issues. .
Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE)
PE is a treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It is considered the gold standard of treatment for PTSD and trauma-related disorders. It involves using exposure as a means of treating trauma symptoms. Exposure could look like anything from discussing your trauma in-depth in a session (“imaginal exposure”), completing tasks that make you confront aspects of your trauma in real life (“in-vivo exposure”), or even simulating physical symptoms of anxiety through physical tasks such as exercise or breathing through a straw (“interoceptive exposure”). While PE is considered a trauma therapy, exposure therapy as a whole is also very helpful in treating anxiety, panic, phobias, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET)
NET is a newer therapy used in the treatment of PTSD and C-PTSD. It involves creating a timeline of impactful events that have happened throughout your life using a rope, stones, and flowers to symbolize your lifeline, traumatic events, and positive events, respectively. Each session processes a new item in chronological order along the timeline. It combines exposure therapy with a component of meaning-making (answering questions about what it meant to go through the event, how the event has changed you, how your perspective on the event has changed over time). At the end of each session, your therapist writes a paragraph about the event you processed, which you will review at the beginning of your next session before processing another event. This continues until the timeline is complete, and at the end of it, you have a written account of your timeline. To learn more about NET, you can visit Vivo International- an independent non-profit committed to providing resources and training in trauma treatment to underserviced geographic regions: https://www.vivo.org/en/narrative-expositionstherapie/
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is a type of trauma therapy that helps people better understand- and address- unhelpful thoughts about what happened to them. It is helpful in addressing shame, guilt, or other unhelpful beliefs about their trauma that keep them “stuck”. The CPT process involves talking and writing about your trauma in order to find ways to think differently, process the trauma, and practice new ways of coping.
Individual Counselling
Are you ready for counselling?
If these sound like things you would like to work on, I would love to hear from you to set up an intake call!