Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Bowen Island, BC.

You can live free of anxiety. There are step you can take. Anxious thinking creates powerful negative messages that impact your thoughts and your body physically. The result is your life begins to shrink. This is no way to live. You are meant to live a full, healthy life. The beautiful thing is you get to choose. Today you can start on a new journey towards freedom that gives you a new level of skill and an understanding of how anxiety works to assist you in defeating it and replacing it with greater peace and joy.

Do you have difficulty “turning off” your brain? Is your anxiety creeping back up on you or has it become overwhelming or paralyzing? Are stress and anxiety negatively impacting your health, relationships, or career? Stress can be even more difficult to manage for those with a pre-disposition towards anxiety. We would like to help. We provide treatment to help you relieve anxiety and stress, develop coping skills, and build confidence. We will address your triggers, your relationship with anxiety as well as your attempts to “control” it, and learn more adaptive ways that allow you to flourish. Call us today at (604) 614 – 7177 to get started.

I help clients dealing with anxiety and stress by using CBT, DBT, and Mindfulness based approaches. I help clients develop awareness and insight around the way they think to then create change in their thinking. Thoughts, Behaviours, and Emotions are all interconnected and drive each person's experience of an event and of themselves. By changing one, we change the other two. I help clients do this while pairing their thoughts with mindfulness based strategies to soothe their stress and anxiety.

Anxiety can severely impact the quality of a person's life. It can impact their sleep, work, relationships, school, and their physical health. Sometimes, anxiety can become so intense that people experience physical symptoms like sweating, heart racing, dizziness, nausea, etc. The good news is that there are effective psychological treatments for anxiety. CBT (Cognitive behavioural therapy), which is the type of therapy I practice, is an evidence-based approach that provides individuals with skills to help manage their anxiety and get control over their lives back.

I support clients both in a somatic, body-focused approach to increase the capacity of our nervous system to sit with uncomfortable emotions and regulate as well as from a cognitive -behavioral lens by reframing our thoughts, emotions and thus behaviors. The combination of these approaches gives you tools to self-regulate and manage your stress outside of the sessions.

I help clients through cognitive behavioral therapy. The premise of this therapy is that thoughts create feelings, which create behaviours. The problem is most of our thoughts are fear based and are not based in truth. I help clients to identify the irrational, untrue thoughts that they are having that are causing them stress and anxiety and learn to replace them with more realistic thoughts that do not creat feelings of anxiety.

How is anxiety standing in your way of living your life? Do you overthink to the point where your worries seem like absolute realities? What conversations are you avoiding out of fear you would embarrass yourself and sound stupid? Who are you not getting closer to because anxiety is telling you old stories about rejection & judgement? How much longer do you want to live like this? WITH ANXIETY COUNSELLING, I CAN HELP YOU DEVELOP RICHER CONNECTIONS TO YOURSELF AND OTHERS – AND START LIVING A MORE FULFILLING LIFE.

Anxiety falls along a continuum from acceptable to crippling, debilitating anxiety requiring professional intervention. The major forms that anxiety takes are: Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Panic Disorder, Phobic Disorders, Social Anxiety Disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (OCD). A variety of proven therapeutic interventions are well established now, eg., Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Yoga, Tai Chi, Breathwork. By diving into therapy clients regain a sense of optimism, courage and confidence in relationships, workplace and career, driving, aging, life transitions and more.

I primarily work with anxiety from an EMDR/body-based perspective. Anxiety is a very "old" physiological response, in that there are parts of anxiety that are unconscious rather than "cognitive." I typically find that if we only attend to the cognitive side of anxiety, the physiological parts, such as body memory and activation, will find somewhere else to pop up. By working on the physical activation, we can better address and move through the anxiety.

Anxiety is a kind of stage fright. It stems from trying to control what can't be controlled: the future, other people, the outcomes of some of our efforts. Because anxiety is so uncomfortable, we often want to avoid facing what’s stirring it up. We may even feel embarrassed or ashamed that we’re anxious. Counselling provides a supportive environment that helps you talk about your anxiety and find better ways of managing it. Feeling connected to another person helps you steady yourself. Counselling provides strategies for handling anxiety in the moment. It also looks at how relationships in your past are contributing to the reactions you’re having now so you can make changes for the better.

Anxiety and stress take a hold on you and never let go, leaving you trapped and frozen. I help my clients to learn all about the magic of mindfulness practice. It's one of the most effective ways to put you in control of your emotions, rather than them controlling you. Imagine how great it would be to have an internal place of peace and serenity that you can use at any time to relax and become grounded. Mindfulness is an ancient practice that is also supported by scientific empirical studies. It's one of the best ways to change your life.

Anxiety and Stress can be incredibly debilitating - and make the smallest of tasks seem like large mountains to climb. I have lived experience with stress and anxiety and support clients with building tools, increase understanding and education and help improve daily functioning. We will work together to determine your goals and take a proactive approach to follow through on a plan for effective solutions. The sessions will lead to improved mood, increased daily functioning and moving from surviving to thriving in your life!

Most of us suffer from anxiety and stress at some point in our lives. And we live with it. What if we didn't have to live with it? What if there was a way to alleviate it from our lives? What if it was a choice? Most of the stress and anxiety in our lives comes from our perspective of what is happening in our lives. This perspective is coming from us, and therefore it is possible to change it. I help clients do this through cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness, meditation and other methods that enable them to become much more aware of their thoughts and the choices they have to think differently. There is no need to suffer. There is another way!