Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Port Coquitlam, BC.

Anxiety and stress can be a debilitating experience sucking the joy out of your day. My goal is to assist you in alleviating these intense feelings, enabling a sense of peace. I employ an approach that involves exploring the origins of your anxiety and stress, challenging and reshaping the perspectives associated with distressing thoughts, and providing you with proven strategies and resources. My hope is to empower you to manage anxiety-inducing situations more effectively and expedite your journey toward lasting relief.

I offer an integrative blend of somatic awareness, mindfulness practices, relational attunement, and trauma-informed presencing to help my clients address anxiety and stress in their lives. Using your natural healing process as our guide, we can help the nervous system learn what a peaceful state of health and vitality is again. I am currently offering sessions online and in person.

We all have worries, yet everyone's approach to those worries varies. My strategy is to understand your past and how it affects you before developing a therapeutic plan. I am interested in your story, strengths and abilities and often that's overlooked. Having a fresh set of eyes to look at the problem objectively can be helpful and change your relationship with anxiety and stress in a positive way.

I support individuals tunderstand and cope with anxiety. The underlying purpose of anxiety is to keep an individual safe and away from harm. Due to complex mechanisms that influence the nervous system, individuals develop stress responses that can be adaptive strategies in the moment but become maladaptive over time, no longer serving one’s best interest. There may be many triggers that can generate overwhelming levels of anxiety in an individual that can difficult to cope with. I use CBT to help clients rewire their nervous system, reframe their belief system, recognize negative automatic thoughts and their generation stemming from critical incidents in childhood.

Anxiety and stress can impact many aspects of our life. It is important to recognize the root of anxiety and stress in our everyday life and to be able to help our recovery. One of the most effective psychotherapies that we use to treat anxiety is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Depending on the source of anxiety, we also draw on other modalities such as Emotion Focused Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, and other approaches. Using these approaches, we help you find your source of anxiety, identify your triggers for anxiety, find your faulty thought patterns and replace them with correct ones, and recognize your unhealthy coping mechanisms and replace them with healthy ones.

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.

Anxiety and panic are often driven by negative experiences or traumas that are stored in the brain and can trigger overwhelming emotional responses. EMDR helps to desensitize and reprocess these memories, reducing the intensity of the emotional response and decreasing symptoms of anxiety and panic. Through the use of bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements or tapping, EMDR can help the brain reprocess the negative experiences, leading to increased emotional regulation and a greater sense of calm and well-being.

Chronic stress and anxiety when untreated can make just 'regular human function' feel like an unsurmountable task. Anxiety tends to be a downstream symptom of other psychological dynamics and experiences, so understanding how we got here can help us process their impact and develop tools to increase resiliency, improve insight, and manage feelings and emotions.

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.