Therapy and Counselling

The clients I see are individuals or couples.  They come from all walks of life, religions, ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientation.   While I will occasionally see older teens, most often I work with adults spanning a wide age range, from young adults just starting out to those in their elder years.

Concerns

The specific concerns and aspirations people bring are varied.  In alphabetical order these are some of the main concerns:

• Anxiety and/or Panic
• Depression
• Life Transitions
• Loss and grief
• Meditation methods and obstacles
• Personal growth
• Relationships
• Self-Esteem
• Spirituality
• Stress management
• Trauma
  
• Work-life balance

At the core, for most people, are feelings of distress and a search for solutions.   People coming to see me might be experiencing difficult life circumstances, losses, and disappointments.  They may feel stuck in difficult patterns of thinking, feeling and acting. Many want to build and improve relationships; they seek to communicate more effectively with key people in their lives at work and other contexts.   They want to build intimate personal relationships.   Essentially they are seeking ways to live with greater ease, purpose, and vitality.

Approaches

There is no formulaic approach to our work together.  Each of us is different – at a different phase in life or working at a different pace and rhythm.  But, there are some fundamental ways of being I strive to bring to all my clients which include authenticity, understanding and acceptance.  I see therapy as a collaboration between us in which your own strengths, experience and wisdom play an important role.  I recognize the courage it takes to enter into therapy and to become increasingly willing to take risks and explore difficult thoughts and emotions.  The sense of safety and trust we create in the therapy space helps us move in those directions- to become more vulnerable, self accepting and self compassionate.  

Within those basic ways of relating to clients, a central perpective is one that is shaped from the commonly accepted understanding that early relationships and events in life, particularly with primary caregivers, are critical to understanding how we later come to relate to ourselves and others and the issues we face.  An exploration of our “attachment”  histories therefore forms an important part of deepening our understanding of why we have come to respond to certain people and situations in habitual, often conflictual ways, and paves the way to weakening their impact.   

I also draw on perspectives and approaches from experiential and emotionally-centered therapies, family systems thinking, as well as the cognitive-behavioural therapies, particularly the more recent developments that incorporate “mindfulness” and compassion.   The list below, in alphabetical order, summarizes the main approaches that I use.   

• Acceptance and Commitment 
• Attachment patterns
• Cognitive-Behavioural 
• Compassion focussed 
• Existential-Humanistic 
• Marital/Relationship
• Mindfulness/Meditation
• Relaxation procedures

As well, my training and experience in the neurosciences informs the work with individuals who would benefit from that perspective, e.g., those who have incurred brain injury or who have a defined condition such as learning disability.

An important part of what we do is to define and encourage taking practical steps to do things, tiny or large, to move in positive ways in key life areas such as relationships, work, health, or sleep.  Self-care practices extend also into how we  choose to relate to inner experiences (our thoughts, physical sensations, emotions, memories and so on).  We can learn, for example, to recognize when we are unduly self-critical and to practice bringing different attitudes and understanding towards ourselves.

Ultimately, a major direction in therapy, a product of all these approaches, is to encourage and to help mobilize a process in you through which you are able to widen your awareness of and to “reframe” your experience, that is, view it and understand it from other perspectives. In so doing it becomes possible to become less compelled and less threatened by longstanding patterns of thinking, feeling and acting that haven’t worked for your life. You become internally more secure, less burdened, more willing to do things that are important to you- to become freer to choose to lead the life you want with love and courage.