Depression Counselling in Hamilton, ON.

The goal of counseling is to help alleviate depressed mood and help you recognize, accept, and cope with the feelings of depression. You will be supported in developing healthy cognitive thinking patterns and beliefs about yourself and the world that helps alleviate and prevent the relapse of depression symptoms. Developing healthy interpersonal relationships help ease and prevent the relapse of depression symptoms And, if necessary, you will be encouraged to appropriately grieve the losses in your life to help you normalize your mood and ‘dig out’ from under the heavy blanket of your depression to reclaim hope to your life.

One of the most well known aspects of mental health, depression, often gets confused with “being sad”. Depression can zap an individual’s energy, while also leaving them with a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Unchecked, depression can be very dangerous, sometimes leading to individuals to consider suicide. Luckily, depression can also be countered through counselling, where an individual can identify and counter the various thought patterns that contribute to their depression, while also fostering hope.

Depression can affect every aspect of your life from creating changes in your mood, intense feelings of sadness, to impacting your work performance, disrupting your sleep, and causing changes in your enjoyment of once pleasurable activities. I utilize evidence-based practices, including cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and narrative therapy, to examine both the current impacts and potential underlying causes to help you manage and break the cycle of depression.

It takes courage to come to therapy for the symptoms of depression, and I don’t take lightly the invitation to walk with someone through their struggles in this area. Together we look at how your thoughts impact your feelings as well as your life story to consider areas of healing from the past as well as solutions for the future. We also consider areas of your thought life that keep you stuck and hinder your forward movement in life.

Negative commentary colours the experiences of individual’s living with depression. Negative thoughts, maladaptive attitudes, and perceptions of despair often are characteristic of people’s experiences with depression. Through Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), these individual thought-processes can be altered in favour of ones which facilitate emotions and behaviours more advantageous and functional to an individual’s daily life. As a practitioner of CBT, an awareness of how an individual’s beliefs may be maintaining symptoms of depression as well as the requisite skills provided to facilitate more adaptive ways of thinking to overcome it will be taught.