Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Mill Bay, BC.

Anxiety, stress, and depression are common symptoms of relationship distress. Research shows that having close connections calms our nervous systems and promotes emotional balance and well-being. What we do with emotion impacts the quality of our relationships, and our relationships impact our emotions. I help clients access, understand, and order their emotional worlds so that they can be used as a compass and vehicle for connection with important others. What we do with emotion makes sense based on our biology and our life experiences, but at times our strategies become outdated. Contact today to schedule a free 15-minute consultation. 

As we explore anxiety and stress together, we’ll cultivate curiosity about where these feelings come from while learning practical tools to self-regulate and build resilience. My approach empowers you with coping strategies tailored to your needs, helping you navigate life’s challenges with greater calm, confidence, and balance for lasting well-being.

Do you worry about not being enough, not doing enough, trying to be perfect? Are you constantly wondering what others are thinking and saying. Maybe you worry about your anxiety, about anxiety symptoms like racing heart, chronic pain or dizziness and fatigue. If you have panic attacks, this can cause you to worry about having a panic attack as well as the actual trigger of the attack. Learn to find your triggers. Cognitive behavioural therapy has tools to help you overcome the fear. Wouldn't it be wonderful to believe you are enough and that perfection is some ideal that you never have to achieve because you are okay. Just the way you are. A work in progress and that's okay. Acceptance.

Dr. Sloat feels we live in a world that overstimulates us, and thus stress and anxiety are sometimes unavoidable, especially for the sensitive among us. She takes a triple approach to treatment in that it is, 1) aimed at teaching strategies and tools for dealing with anxiety and stress as we experience them, 2) geared toward challenging thoughts and beliefs that are anxiety and/or stress producing in themselves, and 3) facilitates management of one's lifestyle such that it becomes balanced.

Dealing with anxiety and stress can feel overwhelming. Day-to-day tasks can be overwhelming. In our sessions, we'll employ evidence-based techniques such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help you identify triggers and thought patterns, giving you practical tools to manage your anxiety. The road to a calmer mind may have its ups and downs, but please know that you're not alone on this journey. With consistent effort and support, you can regain a sense of control and peace in your life.

I offer a safe and supportive space to explore inner experiences, understand anxiety and stress triggers, and develop effective tools for overwhelming emotions. Together, we will identify and challenge unhelpful thought and behavior patterns and core beliefs that fuel anxiety, while developing practical coping strategies. I incorporate distress tolerance and emotional regulation techniques to help clients manage overwhelming feelings and stress, stay in the present moment, and navigate relationships. Through deeper reflection, we also explore underlying patterns, past experiences, and relational dynamics that may contribute to persistent anxiety or stress.

Anxiety can be experienced as feelings of stress, overwhelm, overly-cautious disposition, fatigue, headaches, “churning of the stomach”, and problems sleeping. In therapy, clients can expect to explore thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, learn new ways to respond and cope with stress, and increase self-awareness. At the outcome of therapy, individuals will develop clarity around personal needs and boundaries, feel more connected, and have greater control over self and life, experience increased joy and peace-of-mind, and improved functioning in work, social life, and relationships.

Shelley teaches her clients how to cope with stress and anxiety through Mindfulness, Compassion, and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Understanding the underlying fears that trigger their anxiety, can help clients become more aware of their negative thought patterns. Reframing those negative thoughts and unhealthy core beliefs can help clients to feel more in charge of their life as they experience their world more realistically. Shelley teaches valuable skills to help clients regulate and calm their anxiety by relaxation and visualisation techniques. Shelley's keen ability to attune to her clients with compassion and empathy as well as teaching skills is her gift that leads to her success.

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.

At Seasons Family Centre, we provide compassionate support for anxiety and stress across the lifespan, from young children to adults, including transitional moments such as pregnancy and parenthood. Understanding that these experiences are unique to each individual, we offer a variety of approaches to treatment and collaborate with our clients to determine the best path forward, ensuring they feel empowered as active agents in their own growth and well-being. Our culturally mindful approach prioritizes safety and trust, creating a supportive environment where individuals can explore, process, and develop strategies to navigate life’s challenges with greater ease and resilience.

Anxiety and Stress have become a ubiquitous part of our modern world. For many of us, they are an all too pervasive daily experience and sap the life out of our vital energies. Our work on anxiety and stress will include practical skills and tools to work with and deal with the anxiety and stress. It may involve changing ways of thinking that create more anxiety than necessary in certain situations. We will work toward finding ways of being that allow for more freedom, more ease and more enjoyment in being alive.

Anxiety comes in many forms. From generalized anxiety to phobias to panic, I use a blended CBT and Jungian approach to understand your symptoms, why they are happening in your current life, and help you manage symptoms. Anxiety counselling is my specialization and I have worked in the area for over 10 years. You can find a video about Understanding Anxiety on my website scottkouri.com

Anxiety can feel overwhelming, persistent and disruptive to the life you're wanting. Gravitate Counselling Inc. has five Registered Clinical Counsellors in British Columbia who offer counselling to help ease the impact of anxiety. We can help you identify what creates anxiety, understand how it impacts you, learn new coping skills and strategies, and make changes in your life to decrease how often and how intensely you experience anxiety. We can also help with stress-related concerns, including counselling for parenting and caregiving stress, work-related stress, burnout, and health issues.

I help people work through and overcome painful experiences of stress and anxiety. I approach my clients with kindness and understanding and let them know that they will not be judged by me. By creating an open and trusting relationship, they will not feel humiliated or shamed. Together we will examine the depth of their problem and how it affects them mentally, emotionally, behaviorally and socially. We will explore the triggers underlying their anxiety and learn new skills to reduce their reactions. Clients learn to change faulty beliefs, to relax, to feel more secure and free, and to attain a calmness that they did not experience before.

I use therapeutic insights and my own experience to guide you. If stress and anxiety paralyses you and is hurting those you love, and you don't know what to do, professional assistance is called for. Feelings of anxiety result from our reality and how we look at this reality. Our perspective is shaped by our experience and thinking. By understanding emotionally why you are where you are and why you feel about this the way you will be helpful. By keeping judgment at bay, the emotional space for other insights and options that can help you manage your anxiety better and to discover what you need to do to move beyond your anxiety, will develop.

Anxiety and stress can be the first signs that something is off that we need to respond to in our lives. They can snowball until they have power over us: their impulses conflicting with our greater needs. They can also be signs of deeper issues that are unique to each of our lives. Our personalities, senses of self, life histories, and individual understandings of the world all play a role; as do our nervous systems and embodied patterns of how we generate and resolve anxious feelings. Together we’ll collaborate to get every part of you on your team, aligned with the direction you want to take as as a whole.

Anxiety and stress seem to be ever-present in our world today. Feeling anxious and stressed can often feel inevitable but we do have choices and we can behave differently when confronted with anxiety and stress provoking situations. With over 10 years experience developing resilience promoting programs and services, I will help you gain increased control over your reaction and have you feeling more confident and in charge of yourself. Resilience is a quality and a skill that can be learned.

In anxiety and stress counseling, I provide a safe, confidential space to express whatever thoughts and feelings are weighing on you. Anxiety often involves racing thoughts, physical tension, and feeling overwhelmed by worries about the future. Together we'll work on bringing you back to the present and developing practical tools that help. This might include mindfulness practices to interrupt anxious thought spirals, relaxation techniques to release tension, or examining thought patterns fueling your stress. Our therapeutic relationship matters most—having someone genuinely listen without judgment has real healing power. Clients report feeling calmer, more grounded, and able to handle challenges in a more balanced way.

Stress and anxiety are often caused by uncertainty; feelings of loss of control, unresolved conflict or emotional isolation. These thoughts and experiences tend to create a sense of overwhelm, that life is out of our control. Laurie can help you develop coping behaviors so that you can live a more balanced life, where your energy can be spent on living, rather than on stress and worry. Through working with Laurie and implementing various exercises and techniques, she can help you become more aware of patterns that our thoughts and emotions get caught up in. Once you become aware of these patterns, we are in a better position to alter them; this includes changing our patterns of responses that we experience as stress or anxiety.

Anxiety and stress are different for everyone. What is exciting to one may be too much for another. They can show up as bodily symptoms (panic, breathlessness, jitters, poor sleep). Others notice changes in their thoughts and attention– you might have racing thoughts, fears, and a hard time focusing. Too much stress makes us fearful, then we cope by avoiding some parts of our lives. Or we cope by doing a lot of things that don’t help so much (like worrying). We can get overwhelmed, or over-plan to try to manage. Counselling can help you identify what is going on, where it comes from – and explore what can be done about it, including different ways to calm your nervous system

Feelings of anxiety can become so intense that it becomes overwhelming. Often individuals struggling with anxiety express constant intruding thoughts that focus on fears of events of the future. Anxiety can create physical feelings of distress like a tight chest that makes it difficult to breath, an upset or tight feeling in the stomach, and general fatigue from constantly trying to control their thoughts and actions. Some people have battled anxiety for so long that they begin to believe it is just who they are and accept the restrictions it causes in their life. Through counselling we will work to break the cycle of anxiety controlling your inner world. Bringing a sense of relief, control and freedom that has been absent for so long.

It’s impossible to be human without a little anxiety and stress. The problem arises when anxiety sticks around even when we’re not under threat. I believe it’s important to understand anxiety and stress in the context of your personal, family and cultural history, as well as any external stressors you may be experiencing. Secondly, anxiety and stress live in the body—locating them and applying practical tools like mindfulness, muscle relaxation and breathing techniques to help calm the nervous system can also be very helpful. It all depends on where you’re at and what you need. Ready to feel calmer and sturdier in the face of life’s challenges? Let’s get started.

Anxiety and stress can show up as overwhelming worry, chronic tension, disrupted sleep, or a sense of disconnection. I work with clients to explore the roots of their distress, and build capacity for more ease and joy, even while navigating difficult life circumstances. I draw on modalities that support clients in building more safety and trust in their bodies and relationships, including Somatic Experiencing, Intuitive Eating, EMDR, and parts work.

Stress can prompt the cracks in our normal ways of coping to come into sharp focus. Similarly, anxiety can be all consuming, causing us to replay the tapes of our past over and over again. We may even be spending hours reviewing the tapes of events that only ever took place in our heads! The result is exhaustion and avoidance of anything that feels overwhelming. As a result, life can become small as we limit ourselves to our comfort zone. Unfortunately, this is when depression can creep in for a double-whammy. Yuck! Luckily, stress/anxiety is highly treatable. I work with clients to develop the insights and acquire the tools to overcome stress and anxiety. There is hope. Promise!

I am honoured that you are interested in my services and I would like to tell you a little bit about myself. I have been described as slightly non-conventional in the counselling world, which suits me perfectly, and also tends to suit youth who are trying to stand up to the force of the problems in their life. I am very comfortable working with this population, and I feel fortunate that I can connect with teens the way I do, conventionally or in a way that makes sense to them.