Find a Therapist in Lakeshore, Ontario.

Psychotherapy provides a transformative journey towards gaining perspective, insight, and self-awareness, equipping you with the skills and tools for comprehensive well-being—physically, mentally, and spiritually. At Atlas Therapy, our commitment extends to continually enhancing our expertise through new training and innovative approaches, ensuring optimal support for our clients on their therapeutic journeys. The scientific validation of psychotherapy attests to its efficacy in addressing diverse issues. Nevertheless, our ultimate objective at Atlas is to empower our clients to navigate life's challenges long after our time together.

Psychotherapy is a longer journey that examines the present and the past to identify the repeated patterns of unhelpful approaches you take to dealing with your life's challenges. It's a process that fosters self-discovery, helping you uncover your strengths, resilience, and psychological awareness. One of the key challenges is to maintain a balance between exploring the past and staying present, ensuring you don't overlook something important in your current life. Trust and kindness during your therapy naturally evolve in good psychotherapy.

As a marriage and family therapist and a social worker, I have been providing psychotherapy to individuals, couples and families for over 15 years. Individual work related to loss and grief, self-esteem/confidence, anxiety/depression, addictions, intimacy challenges, sex and sexulaity, childhood and adult abuse, parenting and life tansitions makes up a significant portion of the work I do. I also provide relationship counselling for any relationship you have that is struggling - this includes couples, families, friends and business partners. Whether you are looking for yourself or for one of your relationships, therapy can assist you in reaching your individual and relational potential

Psychotherapy with me involves building a mutually respectful and collaborative therapeutic alliance so that we can safely and openly address and process your issues. Through this process, you can gain valuable insight and self-knowledge. I believe that change happens when you become fully self-aware of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and from that point on you can choose how you would like to think, feel, and behave going forward.

I use several research-based theories for individual counseling CBT, DBT & ACT. These theories provide practical skills that can help you gain a better understanding of yourself. By reframing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we can reduce emotional suffering. In my work as a mental health nurse, I have had the privilege of working with many people struggling with difficult situations and trauma. My approach is to be present, empathetic, and to understand the clients’ prospective. Relationships take hard work and commitment. Giving each person a place to voice their side of the story and be heard by their partner can often iron out the wrinkles in a relationship & help couples reconnect.

My approach to Psychotherapy is dynamic in that I use a variety of integrative modalities. I believe that it is important to be able provide clients with various treatment models, as we are each client is unique. In addition, I use Mindfulness and a Sensorimotor approach throughout my psychotherapeutic services, as it is a necessary part of the healing journey.

Psychotherapy's major objectives are to reduce symptoms, maintain or enhance day-to-day functioning, and improve quality of life. Psychotherapy helps with managing stressful life events, the effects of trauma, medical disease, or bereavement (such as the death of a loved one), and some mental health issues like anxiety or depression. Positive physiological and neurological changes have been associated with psychotherapy, which has been shown to enhance emotional and psychological health. Psychotherapy comes in a variety of forms, and certain forms may be more effective in particular therapeutic contexts. Psychotherapy may be used in combination with medication or other therapies.

As a gestalt psychotherapist, who pairs gestalt training with somatic experiencing I can help support you in healing from your trauma. No one in the Niagara Region utilizes the combination of these therapies and applies them to working with couples in crisis. I am sorry to say but popular approaches to healing trauma like CBT will provide only temporary relief at best. If you want to get to the root of your trauma and heal somatic experiencing (SE) is what you need and when supported with the power of relational gestalt therapy you will shift your shit! SE focuses on regulating your nervous system. Gestalt focuses on awareness, contact and authenticity, it will help being relational.

Individuals often come to psychotherapy when the coping strategies they were previously using are no longer helpful, and potentially, they have become problematic or destructive. Together we will explore the areas of your life that are frustrating you or causing you pain, and/or discuss situations or relationships from the past that are still impacting your life today.

Psychotherapy is a dynamic process that provides great explanations for understanding human behavior. Personality development begins during the first years of life. Children born into warm and empathic environments are likely to grow into healthy adults. If this nurturing is absent personality disorders can develop. Psychotherapy explains some of these derailments. Without help many people continue to function in dysfunctional ways. The barriers erected to survive in the past become harmful to their present situation. Psychotherapy helps people re-gain a feeling of safety and self esteem. Through this restoration people are then able to begin enjoying more meaningful relationships.

Psychotherapy is primarily a talk-based therapy and is intended to help you improve and maintain positive mental health and well-being. I work with individuals, couples and families in individual and group settings. Psychotherapy occurs when the Registered Psychotherapist (RP) and client enter into a psychotherapeutic relationship where both work together to bring about positive change in the client’s thinking, feeling, behaviour and social functioning. Individuals usually seek psychotherapy when they have thoughts, feelings, moods and behaviours that are adversely affecting their day-to-day lives, relationships and the ability to enjoy life.