Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Ottawa, ON.

Are you feeling stressed, exhausted, burned out, and run down? Have you been exposed to stress and trauma through your work as a front-line healthcare professional? Our biological bodies and brains were not designed for the types of financial, cultural, social, and relational stressors we live with today. I see anxiety as a reminder to start listening to our body, our mind, and spirit. I can help you with Mindfulness-based stress reduction and self-care approaches to guide you toward a more peaceful, meaningful, and fulfilling life.

Anxiety and Stress are both life and living challenges. They are part of the normal obstacles we face in our lifetime, be it in health, in illness, in marriage, in couple and relationship issues, in aging and with our children. The thoughts, feelings and behaviors associated with them can often overwhelm and even paralyze us when they occur. In a supportive and empathic environment I help people understand and demystify these feelings and find coping strategies so that they can overcome these crippling experiences in order to live productively again.

I’ve been helping people lead more intentional lives for over 20 years. Anxiety can cause thoughts to be out of proportion to reality, stop you from doing what you want to do, and make you feel out of control. I’m trained in cognitive behavioral therapy, developmental models,and anxiety and depression management. I will support you in creating a set of tools to help you manage your anxiety. Most importantly, you're a distinctive person, with distinctive needs. My goal is to work with you as a unique individual, and focus on YOUR goals.

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 and stress often have deep root causes. EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) can be an invaluable tool. My work with EMDR, and other modalities, can be greatly assistive to clients in these situations. I offer customized options and strategies based on your personal needs and challenges. It is so important to have a professional who believes in your abilities even when you might not. I work from the belief that you have the resources within you to cope and that it is my role to support you to connect to that wisdom.

It's critical to understand that, even if you suffer from panic attacks, compulsive thoughts, ongoing worry, or a phobia, you don't have to live in fear and anxiety. In many cases, therapy is the most effective strategy to handle anxiety-related problems. Therapy gives you the skills and teaches you how to use them to overcome anxiety. If stress is not managed, it can become chronic stress and ultimately lead to burnout. While burnout leaves people feeling completely exhausted and unmotivated to keep going, stress often results in people feeling overwhelmed. Therapy provides coping mechanisms for stress symptoms, which may help to avoid burnout.

Anxiety and stress can affect all aspects of our lives. It can impact our mood, it can impact our thoughts and it can impact our functioning. It's quite an overwhelming experience at times. In therapy, we can work together to reduce your experience of distress, find balance in life, and reconnect with experiences of joy. We will work towards improving your sense of well being and help you regain your ability to function in this high paced world.

For anxiety and fears, a multimodal approach will be used with cognitive behavioural therapy and narrative. It will facilitate the identification of the anxiety or fears while creating a preferred narrative surrounding it. The benefits of using the combination of these two approach is that it will allow for an alternative perspective and to better understand what one is thinking and feeling.

Anxiety and Stress are the most common issues that I work with. Anxiety can take many forms so I will take the time to understand the specific type of anxiety with you. We will start to track the anxiety frequency and severity to better understand it. We will then work in session on coping strategies to decrease the impact that the anxiety is having on your daily life. We will also work towards exposing you gradually in a way that will allow you to be better able to tolerate your anxiety and live with it!

Anxiety can come in many forms, such as: panic and anxiety attacks; extreme fear; worrying thoughts from which one rarely gets a break; sleeplessness either due to going over and over how one behaved during the day, and judging oneself, or, from dreading what the following day might bring; fear and avoidance of one's own intense emotions; fear of rejection of others, leading to intense social anxiety or avoidance of close relationships; performance anxiety, such as worries about exams, job interviews, or performance appraisals at one's place of work. I like to get a sense of the frequency, intensity, and duration of somebody's anxiety, and then to help them to reduce all 3.

Anxiety, stress and panic attacks can be debilitating and life-limiting. Anxiety is a specialty area for me and I work to get at the root of the problem as well as provide practical and powerful tools to help eliminate or significantly manage these issues. Some anxiety may be trauma-based and I utilize a trauma-informed approach to therapy in general. You don't have to let stress anxiety rule your life - there is effective help here!

Anxiety can consume a person's life, making it unbearable. I aim to help you learn to understand how your thoughts contribute to anxiety symptoms. By learning to change those thought patterns, you will learn how to reduce the likelihood and intensity of anxiety symptoms. Using behavioural therapy, you will learn techniques to reduce undesired behaviours associated with anxiety disorders. You will learn to manage your anxiety when situations provoke anxiety and how to manage and thrive in spite of the expectation of anxiety.

Learning how to manage anxiety & deal with the irrational thoughts or distressing behaviours associated with anxiety is an essential first step to recovery. Processing the deeper emotions & meanings associated with past & present day difficult life situations is also important to build a more secure, resilient self that is capable of facing the challenges of everyday life without becoming overwhelmed.