Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Cochrane, AB.

Anxiety and stress can feel overwhelming, often hijacking your thoughts, disrupting sleep, and making it hard to stay present in daily life. In our work together, I’ll help you understand the roots of your anxiety and recognize how it shows up in your body, mind, and relationships. My approach blends practical tools for calming the nervous system with deeper work to address the beliefs and patterns that keep anxiety stuck. You'll gain strategies to manage stress in the moment while also building long-term resilience and emotional clarity.

Anxiety and stress are sometimes helpful responses and can carry important information for us about our current lives. However, they can also be overwhelming and come with sensations that are difficult to tolerate. I can help you learn techniques to soothe your body, regain balance, and address the mind chatter that may be perpetuating your anxiety.

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.

Our therapists have extensive experience working with mental health issues, such as anxiety, OCD, social anxiety and panic. Stress and anxiety are the most common problems in our modern world and manifests as either over functioning (perfectionism) or under functioning (procrastination). We feel that anxiety is at it’s core an adaptive neurological reactions to threat. It’s an early alarm system that allows us to stay safe. However, this adaptive system gets hijacked and the alarm starts going off all the time. We draw on both bottom up (relaxation exercises, grounding and mindfulness) and top down (cognitive restructuring) approaches to working with anxiety.

Anxiety and stress management is my primary specialty. Anxiety takes many different forms - whether it is the constant on edge and I have to fix it feeling, the perpetual what-if and worrying cycle, your mind racing each time you try to relax, or that 'wired' feeling in the body. I draw from a variety of counselling modalities depending on what fits you best - this might include looking at your thoughts and core beliefs, getting to work more on your value system and knowing what matters, or bringing more compassion to yourself. You can expect to learn strategies you can use between sessions, so you can spend less time in therapy and more time connecting to what matters.

Anxiety and Stress are the norm in today's world. Our fast-paced society pulls our attention in many directions and often away from ourselves. Being disconnected from our feelings, needs and wants is often a cause of anxiety. Mindfulness-based counselling is a powerful way to have us create an island of sanity for ourselves amidst the speed of our lives. By learning to reconnect with ourselves amidst the busyness of life, we are put back into relationship with our hearts and what is truly meaningful to us.

Are you living your life constantly feeling on-edge? Are you a worrier who can't seem to turn it off? Does anxiety or stress keep you from being fully present for your family? As an anxiety and stress specialist, I know rough this can be. But there is hope. Together, we can deploy powerful techniques to get you feeling calm, relaxed, and emotionally thriving, so you can effectively deal with life challenges. Imagine: going about your day feeling excited rather than worried, confident rather than stressed, and focused rather than scattered. If you’re ready to stop worrying and start living, reach out.

I help clients manage anxiety and stress with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a research-based approach in which I am certified. I help clients with managing stress, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobias, health anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.