Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Esquimalt, BC.

Anxiety is a very common experience for many people and can manifest within a person's life in many different ways. I provide opportunities for people to learn about anxiety, develop an awareness about their thoughts, emotions and beliefs that fuel anxiety and offer clinically proven strategies for overcoming anxiety. I work together with individuals to develop a counselling program that entails understanding where a person's anxiety may have originated, developing an awareness into the situations and relationships that trigger their anxiety and employing coping methods to help manage anxiety in daily life.

Anxiety and stress are normal responses to life events, work and relationship/family pressures, and worry and fear. In therapy we can explore the context of your life and relationships and how these relate to the stress and anxiety. Through individual or family counselling we can develop goals and strategies for addressing the stress or anxiety. I utilize therapeutic interventions from Response-Based Practice, Narrative Therapy, Solution-Focused Therapy, and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

I help people work through and overcome painful experiences of stress and anxiety. I approach my clients with kindness and understanding and let them know that they will not be judged by me. By creating an open and trusting relationship, they will not feel humiliated or shamed. Together we will examine the depth of their problem and how it affects them mentally, emotionally, behaviorally and socially. We will explore the triggers underlying their anxiety and learn new skills to reduce their reactions. Clients learn to change faulty beliefs, to relax, to feel more secure and free, and to attain a calmness that they did not experience before.

Some amount of anxiety and stress is a normal and necessary reaction to life events and situations. Yet, too much or too little can create obstacles to living your life fully and peacefully. I can help you to learn and practice skills needed to manage anxiety and to improve interactions with people in your life. We can also work together to reduce, and in some cases, take the "charge" out of the intensity of the triggers that cause unhelpful anxious reactions. Different therapies we can use include to talk therapy, CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and/or EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).

I offer an integrative blend of somatic awareness, mindfulness practices, relational attunement, and trauma-informed presencing to help my clients address anxiety and stress in their lives. Using your natural healing process as our guide, we can help the nervous system learn what a peaceful state of health and vitality is again. I am currently offering sessions online and in person.

Stress in the right amount, at the right time, and in the right manner helps us grow. The problem with most modern stress is that it violates all three conditions and never comes one issue at a time! Together, we will identify what your stressors are, how you perceive them, what sense of control you feel you have, what symptoms define them, and what resources you can muster to deal with them. You are not powerless - it just feels that way at times.

Do you feel tense and uptight and want to be more relaxed? Stress is the result of overloading our capacity to cope. Anxiety and worry make us suffer for bad outcomes that have not even happened. Counseling will help you identify triggers and to relieve them in healthy ways. We will talk about anxiety attacks and flashbacks and hypervigilance. We'll look at your past for the roots of anxiety and stress. You may be taking meds (check with doctor first) or using alcohol or drugs or pot and want to deal with your feelings yourself. Do you want to strengthen your trust and faith that the world is mainly a safe place? Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) or EMDR are interventions we can discuss.

Shelley teaches her clients how to cope with stress and anxiety through Mindfulness, Compassion, and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Understanding the underlying fears that trigger their anxiety, can help clients become more aware of their negative thought patterns. Reframing those negative thoughts and unhealthy core beliefs can help clients to feel more in charge of their life as they experience their world more realistically. Shelley teaches valuable skills to help clients regulate and calm their anxiety by relaxation and visualisation techniques. Shelley's keen ability to attune to her clients with compassion and empathy as well as teaching skills is her gift that leads to her success.

The source of our stresses may be numerous but a clear and unbiased awareness of the self-talk that contributes to each experience is a powerful source of change and empowerment. As I listen to each account and draw out further details that make the experience more understandable, I also map out the potential changes and outline the new self-talk that will reduce the stresses and anxiety.

Stress is a fact of life. Work, school, finances, relationships, raising children, concerns about the future, and countless other issues can be overwhelming. We simply cannot handle long-term, chronic stress without health consequences. Anxiety goes hand-in-glove with stress. Stress can lead to feelings of anxiety, and anxiety often heightens stress levels. This feedback loop can feel crazy-making, overwhelming, and get in the way of everything. In my practice, I help people to better understand stress and anxiety, and learn ways to deepen their ability to cope, and move toward enjoying increased peace of mind and sense of stability. Contact me for a free 30-minute consultation to discuss how we can work together toward getting you feeling like you are more in control of your life.

Anxiety can feel overwhelming, persistent and disruptive to the life you're wanting. Gravitate Counselling Inc. has five Registered Clinical Counsellors in British Columbia who offer counselling to help ease the impact of anxiety. We can help you identify what creates anxiety, understand how it impacts you, learn new coping skills and strategies, and make changes in your life to decrease how often and how intensely you experience anxiety. We can also help with stress-related concerns, including counselling for parenting and caregiving stress, work-related stress, burnout, and health issues.

Occasional bouts of anxiety are entirely normal and one of the unavoidable costs of being—and staying—alive. However, sometimes worries get out of control Anxiety is now the leading mental health problem around the world. Uncertainty doesn’t cause anxiety, but it provides breeding grounds for it. Some ways to manage anxiety disorders include learning about anxiety, mindfulness, relaxation techniques, correct breathing techniques, dietary adjustments, exercise, learning to be assertive, building self-esteem, cognitive therapy, exposure therapy, structured problem solving, medication and support groups.

My office is a safe space to express any thoughts and feelings about your life in complete confidence. Sharing painful experiences under the Witness of an empathic human being has incredible healing power. Within this therapeutic relationship, we can use mindfullness practices, progressive muscle-relaxation, and Cognitive Therapy to transform your experience of stress into the present, balanced, and relaxed way of living that you have not had in a very, very long time.

When you worry you suffer in advance for outcomes which have not yet happened and, in fact, rarely do happen. It is bad enough to suffer the bad things that really do happen without suffering needlessly. We will seek to strengthen faith and trust that the world is mainly safe for you. Stress is the result of overloading our coping competencies. We will talk about riding through anxiety attacks and techniques to reduce uncomfortable hyper vigilance. We will look back into your history to find the roots of anxiety and stress. We may use trauma relief strategies such as EMDR or Traumatic Incident reduction (TIR). Counseling for anxiety and stress should make you happier and more relaxed.

I work holistically with anxiety and life stressors/transitions, believing in a three pronged approach that includes diet/nutrition, physical exercise and dealing with chronic stress and trauma. Addressing all 3 of these areas as well as learning various strategies and tools to deal with stress and anxiety directly can help alleviate your symptoms relatively quickly. In addition, we will take a personalized look at what isn't working in your life and what is fueling your response. Healing looks different for everyone, and I will work with you to sort out your unique situation, and help bring you back in to alignment with your authentic self.

Anxiety and stress can be the first signs that something is off that we need to respond to in our lives. They can snowball until they have power over us: their impulses conflicting with our greater needs. They can also be signs of deeper issues that are unique to each of our lives. Our personalities, senses of self, life histories, and individual understandings of the world all play a role; as do our nervous systems and embodied patterns of how we generate and resolve anxious feelings. Together we’ll collaborate to get every part of you on your team, aligned with the direction you want to take as as a whole.

Anxiety and Stress have become a ubiquitous part of our modern world. For many of us, they are an all too pervasive daily experience and sap the life out of our vital energies. Our work on anxiety and stress will include practical skills and tools to work with and deal with the anxiety and stress. It may involve changing ways of thinking that create more anxiety than necessary in certain situations. We will work toward finding ways of being that allow for more freedom, more ease and more enjoyment in being alive.

Do you worry about not being enough, not doing enough, trying to be perfect? Are you constantly wondering what others are thinking and saying. Maybe you worry about your anxiety, about anxiety symptoms like racing heart, chronic pain or dizziness and fatigue. If you have panic attacks, this can cause you to worry about having a panic attack as well as the actual trigger of the attack. Learn to find your triggers. Cognitive behavioural therapy has tools to help you overcome the fear. Wouldn't it be wonderful to believe you are enough and that perfection is some ideal that you never have to achieve because you are okay. Just the way you are. A work in progress and that's okay. Acceptance.

I use therapeutic insights and my own experience to guide you. If stress and anxiety paralyses you and is hurting those you love, and you don't know what to do, professional assistance is called for. Feelings of anxiety result from our reality and how we look at this reality. Our perspective is shaped by our experience and thinking. By understanding emotionally why you are where you are and why you feel about this the way you will be helpful. By keeping judgment at bay, the emotional space for other insights and options that can help you manage your anxiety better and to discover what you need to do to move beyond your anxiety, will develop.

Anxiety and stress are different for everyone. What is exciting to one may be too much for another. They can show up as bodily symptoms (panic, breathlessness, jitters, poor sleep). Others notice changes in their thoughts and attention– you might have racing thoughts, fears, and a hard time focusing. Too much stress makes us fearful, then we cope by avoiding some parts of our lives. Or we cope by doing a lot of things that don’t help so much (like worrying). We can get overwhelmed, or over-plan to try to manage. Counselling can help you identify what is going on, where it comes from – and explore what can be done about it, including different ways to calm your nervous system

If you're up against anxiety, I offer an empowering and collaborative approach. There is an opportunity to explore your experience and to begin to see yourself as separate from anxiety. Through conversations, you may begin to identify alternative stories that challenge anxious thoughts and beliefs. We'd attend to your capacity and establish coping strategies to foster a sense of possibility. Together the we would co-create a new narrative that emphasizes the your resiliency, self-compassion and a greater sense of calm.

I am honoured that you are interested in my services and I would like to tell you a little bit about myself. I have been described as slightly non-conventional in the counselling world, which suits me perfectly, and also tends to suit youth who are trying to stand up to the force of the problems in their life. I am very comfortable working with this population, and I feel fortunate that I can connect with teens the way I do, conventionally or in a way that makes sense to them.

Everyone feels anxiety at some point in their lives but when it starts to interfere with your life, counseling can help. Although anxiety can feel debilitating, it is treatable. People with anxiety don’t always share the same symptoms, they vary from person to person. Therapy will help you to reclaim your life and function in a chronically stressful world.

Anxiety is misunderstood to be a reaction to stress, but it is not a reaction. Anxiety is a state of mind. People who have mastered stress can enter high-stress situations without anxiety. The ability to attain mental calm under pressure is not love, heroism, or commitment, it's brain control. I learned to control anxiety by climbing sheer cliffs alone and unroped, but one doesn't have to be thrown into the deep end of the pool. It's a matter of learning to control your brain's frequencies. Anxiety alerts you to danger. Disengaging the triggers that create anxiety is another question. Pick your stressors and protect yourself from danger. Control the situation, adjust the anxiety.

Our culture is permeated with stress and anxiety, and we develop habitual ways of reacting to situations that actually reinforce our stress and anxiety. Although stress reactions can be helpful in avoiding danger, in a day to day way these reactions can actually interfere with our ability to cope. In therapy, you will learn new ways to calm and self-regulate, to change habitual and negative beliefs, and to react differently in stressful situations. By using simple mindfulness techniques that calm the nervous system, you can actually minimize your stress or anxious reaction. The result is a more positive life experience which will lead to more satisfaction.