Depression Counselling in Bon Accord, AB.

Depression is not a journey you need to make alone. Our therapists can help you to: •Find your inner motivation and strength to live your life •Engage in activities that are proven to help alleviate symptoms of depression, such as exercise, good nutrition and meditation •Uncover and explore the life problems that contribute to your depression •Overcome isolation and reconnect with significant people in your life •Identify and challenge negative thinking patterns that lead to feeling helpless and hopeless •Control your thoughts and feelings so they no longer overwhelm you •Help you draw on your own emotional, mental and spiritual resources in the process of healing from depression.

I view depression as a protective response that often develops when the nervous system has been overwhelmed by trauma or prolonged stress. Rather than seeing it as weakness, I help clients understand depression as the body’s way of conserving energy and guarding against pain. Through a trauma-informed and attachment-based approach, we explore the emotions and experiences beneath the shutdown, using somatic awareness, mindfulness, and gentle reconnection to restore safety and vitality. Over time, clients begin to experience relief, self-compassion, and renewed connection with themselves and their lives.

Living with depression can make you feel hopeless, and worthless. Sometimes it sneaks up on you, and you may not even remember when you started feeling unlike yourself. Depression can drain your energy and often result in racing thoughts over the past, bringing up feelings of guilt, and shame. It can also be marked by fatigue, even when sleeping a lot. There are many treatment options available for depression, including EMDR.

I provide help for individuals experiencing depression and how it may be affecting multiple aspects of everyday life such as work, family, friendships, other relationships and day-to-day responsibilities. In counselling I help clients better understand multiple aspects of depression, develop the tools needed to cope more effectively, and restore feelings of hope.

Has Depression Left You Feeling Stuck In Your Life? Is it difficult to live your life due to a depressed mood, a lack of energy, and a general apathy toward everything? Have you wondered why you simply can’t “snap out of it”? When you try to stay positive, do feelings of hopelessness keep cropping up? Whether you have felt this way for a long time or a short while, functioning with depression is exhausting, and you may be wondering if therapy could provide relief to help make life more manageable.

Depression is a common mental health condition that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and changes in how you think, sleep, eat and act. Depression is treatable — usually with talk therapy, medication or both. My primary therapeutic approach is centered on several cognitive therapies, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT for depression focuses on disrupting negative thought patterns and replacing them with more helpful ones. CBT aims to modify the unhelpful thinking and behavioural patterns that impair one’s functioning. These changes can lead to healthier behaviours and improved emotion regulation.

Many people believe that in order to be "strong," they need to bury their feelings and keep them hidden from others. Over time, this can backfire, as feelings can build and take over, leaving a person feeling down and depressed, or overwhelmed. I work with clients not only to work through feelings of anger, resentment, hurt, and sadness that have built up, but to develop new habits of self-care, assertiveness, boundaries, healthy expression of feelings, communication, and stress management so that this does not occur again in the future. By doing this, they can become a more well-rounded person, who feels free to express feelings as they arise, and no longer carries them with them.

The way you think greatly impacts how you feel, and navigating this on your own can be confusing. If you are one of the 1in 5 Canadians that experience depression at sometime in your life, there is help. Together we can take a closer look at how you think and appraise circumstances and events and explore how that impacts your overall outlook and feelings. When you change the way you think you can change how you feel and I am here to help with that.

Are you struggling to get out of bed, losing interest in once-loved activities or feeling helpless and hopeless? The lethargic and foggy shutdown of depression can make everything in life feel just a few inches out of reach. The good news is that depression is readily treatable. I would be glad to help you explore what is keeping your body stuck in numb disconnection. Next, we form a plan to help you back to your best self. Together we tackle here-and-now symptoms with strategies of mindfulness and CBT, while also untying old knots from the past with emotion-focused and inner-child work. The heaviness of depression is your body asking for care. Are you ready to answer its call?

Are you struggling with the constant influence of depression in your life? Please know that there is hope for you, for your life, and for relief from the burden of depression. You may be in need of the support that you will find by coming to see me in therapy. Depression can tear a whole in the normal activities of life, and keeps you feeling lost, alone, and without hope. You are not alone, and together we will work through your experience of depression and help you to move towards the things that you love and care for. I am confident that together we will find a way through pain to joy and peace.