Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Tsawwassen, BC.

We live in anxious and stressful times. Although anxiety is an expected and adaptive reaction to stress, it can become a problem when it limits our ability to work, socialize, and enjoy life. The good news is we know that evidenced-based techniques can significantly reduce anxiety and help cope with stress. Our reactions to stress can impact all areas of life including work, relationships, and general well-being. I want to help you manage the current stress in your life, and develop resilience to make it easier to rebound from future challenges.

Both anxiety and stress serve a purpose in our lives; a small or healthy amount of it keeps us on our toes and striving to better ourselves. An over-abundance, though, makes life painful. Treatable forms of anixety include generalized anxiety, social anxiety, health anxiety, panic disorder, and OCD. Using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, EMDR Therapy, and/or other strategies, we will work together to help you experience a much better quality of life. Believe it or not, you CAN find relief; you don't need to live with anxiety surrounding you or making you feel debilitated on your journey through life.

Real Solutions to Real Challenges. Stress is necessary for survival and provides opportunity for growth. However, it can aslo result in anxiety and even panic with accompaning physical symptoms. Unproductive coping mechanisms may kick in that have become entrenched and difficult to break. In more severe cases Obsessive-Complusive Behaviors may surface to distract us from the anxieties. These obsessive-compulsive behaviors may become debilitating and incredibly frustrating. Martin helps clients deminish their anieties by cognitive restructuring, relaxation training, and overcoming avoidance. Avoidance only provides short-term relief, at the cost significantly damaging our self-esteem

Anxiety has a purpose - once you understand it you can benefit from it. The feeling of anxiety is giving you information about who you are and what you need to do to be yourself. In counselling, you can learn how to process anxiety instead of fearing it. You can learn concrete skills to work through anxiety; You can learn from the emotions and in the process find a more colourful and rich, positive experience of life.

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.

One of the most most successful approaches to helping my clients cope with anxiety, is helping them understand anxiety itself and the overall awareness of how it psychologically and psychologically affects us all individually. It is then I will be be able to introduce several cognitive behavioral interventions so that my clients may learn better coping mechanisms to help manage their anxieties.

We are far more primitive in our reactions than we like to think, and fear, stress, or anxiety, can go from an adaptive warning to a very non adaptive over reaction, arresting our ability to function. I have worked extensively in this area, in giving workshops and as a trainer for other counsellors, focusing first on understanding the body's reaction and then developing skills to over-ride the anxiety response. Using a mindfulness approach, staying connected with our needs, and focusing on resiliency, anxiety can be tamed.

Anxiety as a result of stress is one of, if not the major contributing factor to poor health in most areas of people lives. If you have ever been tense before an exam or a visit to the dentist, you have a felt anxiety. Increased heart rate, sweating, rapid breathing, dry mouth, & a sense of dread are common. Changing this involves cognitive & behavioural approaches. Cognitive change is understanding how thoughts contribute to symptoms and how to change thought patterns to reduce the intensity of your anxiety. And behavioral changes involve using techniques to reduce or stop any undesired behaviors that are a result of the anxiety you have been experiencing.

Anxiety is exhausting partly because it never really clocks off. The mind keeps scanning for threats. The body stays braced for impact. You might replay a conversation from three days ago, plan for seventeen possible outcomes, or stay perpetually busy just to keep the worry from having too much room to move around in. It's a full-time job, and nobody applied for it. In anxiety counselling, we get curious about what's actually driving the alarm, not just how to turn the volume down. Turns out most anxious minds have very good reasons for being anxious. Finding those reasons tends to change the relationship with the worry itself. Not a cure. But real relief.

Most of my clients over the past twenty plus years have dealt with some form of anxiety and stress. There are many helpful approaches to managing these such as mindfulness and breath awareness, but I have found that often the greatest healing comes from learning to trust one's self and the process of life. Listening to one's deepest self and learning to express one's truth verbally or creatively, may also help the person transform their anxiety and live with greater energy and joy. As with most issues, each individual is unique, as is the approach that is called for.

While our bodies are perfectly designed to adapt and react to stress, modern problems mean that we tend to detect life threatening dangers in very ordinary places. Conflicts at work, arguments in our relationships and uncertainties such as the post-Covid world activate old survival mechanisms. We may be stuck in the buzzing, fear states of ‘fight-flight’ or the numb and paralyzed states of ‘freeze and shut down.’ The good news is that I have a long history of safely and successfully helping individuals and couples to reduce and release stress using a variety of CBT and mindfulness techniques, as well as trauma-informed therapy. You have my commitment to compassionate and educated care.

If you are running on empty from trying to hold everything together, traditional talk therapy alone can sometimes feel like it is not quite enough. I specialize in helping individuals who look perfectly fine and successful on the outside, but whose bodies are privately locked in constant survival mode, anxiety, and exhaustion. In our sessions, we do not just analyze your thoughts. Instead, I act as your ally, blending gentle modern Western psychotherapies like EMDR, IFS, and ACT with grounding Eastern mindfulness. We will work at your own pace to process stress at a core level, soothe your overactive nervous system, and safely let go of the heavy baggage you have been carrying for so long.

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.