Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Ottawa, ON.

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 can be a pretty consuming, stressful, and overwhelming feeling. In therapy, we will explore the roots of your feelings of anxiety in order to understand where they originated. Additionally, depending on the type of anxiety you are experiencing, whether it be worrying, panic, nervousness, etc., we will: 1. Create a plan for dealing with the anxiety and stress 2. Work on overcoming the anxiety and stress. Interventions that we may use to accomplish these goals are mindfulness, relaxation and breathing, behavioural, cognitive, as well as insight oriented. I will also, collaboratively, draw on other therapeutic approaches to work towards your whole health, well-being, and freedom.

In working with clients on their anxiety and stress I primarily aim to promote understanding: understanding of why we are feeling so anxious and stress, what factors contribute, what can be done to better manage or eliminate anxiety and stress from our lives, and most importantly, how to eliminate ambiguity from our lives. I specialize in working with clients on their stress and anxiety, whether it stems from work, relationships, family, trauma, or our lifestyle in general. It is only through understanding that we can promote comprehensive and meaningful change in our lives. I utilize principles of cognitive behavioural therapy, solution-focused work, and psychodynamics in my work.

Anxiety ranges from a minor annoyance to an absolutely debilitating state. I work with individuals like yourself to first come to a true and thorough understanding of what your experience with anxiety is like. How it shows up, what it feels like, and what causes it to show up. It is at this point that we can then explore coping strategies that are applicable to YOU and the anxiety that you experience.

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.

Rushing through life, panicked about all that needs to get done and never feeling enough? Stress and Anxiety steal the joy of life and life feels like being on the perpetual spin cycle. To your mind, anxiety and stress feel like genuine threats to your survival. You can spend days, months, years even in a constant state of stress. Stress will shift your body and mind into the fight or flight and you'll find yourself highly reactive and struggle to think through your life and claim your empowerment. Let us help! We will work with you to help calm your mind, set boundaries and shift from reactivity to responsiveness so you choose how you want to respond to life and live on your terms.

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.

Living with anxiety and stress can become extremely disabling! Anxiety requires lots of energy and time consuming. Anxiety and stress can be explained by several factors, and if it not treated, and persist over time, the risks of burnout/depression are greater. If you are suffering from anxiety, you might know that it is now having an impact in all spheres of your life: work, relationships, social life, etc. Let's look closely at the causes of your anxieties, and let's work together to aim for a better quality of life.

Saint Paul University’s Counselling and Psychotherapy Centre welcomes a diverse clientele, for individual or couple’s therapy. Services are provided by counselling interns at the Master of Arts and Doctoral level in Counselling and Spirituality at Saint Paul University. *Services in French available

Depression looks to the past with sadness, and anxiety looks to the future with fear. We live in the present and residing in these other places means we not only miss out on our lives as they happen, but we find ourselves fretful about what is to come. Understanding anxiety, its needs and its present function (because it is not hanging around for nothing) is a profound part of anxiety work that can be done alongside a therapist.

In these unprecedented times in our lives many of us are dealing with feelings of great uncertainty about our individual future and how to handle and cope with life changes. Repetitive thoughts are often aligned with anxiety. Anxiety has a cyclical pattern and unless it is interrupted it will run its course, causes overwhelming feelings of fear and despair. Through a compassionate and observational lens reducing stress and anxiety will cultivate focus and clarity. Learning to connect to our senses is very grounded and can quickly break the anxiety cycle and help bring us back to our own center. Book a free consultation to see if we are a good fit.

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.

When our sense of self is threatened we respond by experiencing anxiety. In verbalizing our anxiety we begin to see our reality with more clarity. We consider the beliefs and events on which we base our reality and examine our protective strategies and the consequences of our choices. We learn to expand our reality so as to include various helpful factors that we earlier omitted and that will better allow us to manage our stress and anxiety.