Areas of Special Focus
Trauma and Crisis
We used to think of trauma as the Big Three: a car accident, war zone, or violent assault. But today our understanding of trauma has expanded to include more common life experiences like break-ups, being fired, or humiliated in front of the class. Most experiences of being excluded or “othered” have painful anchors, because we are intrinsically social creatures and when we’re excluded our literal survival is called into question. If we’ve been neglected or overlooked it can seem like nothing “traumatic” ever happened to us, but sometimes trauma is what didn’t happen to us. I can help you make sense of some pretty incomprehensible situations.
Stress Regulation
Sometimes someone just says or does that thing that really sets us off. Intense emotional reactions can overtake our whole bodies, and it might be hours or days before we’re able to calm down and feel like ourselves again. We might lunge into anger or spiral into self-doubt and not know how to get out. For others, stress can feel like an invisible weight they’ve been carrying so long, they’ve forgotten they were even carrying it. I can help you condition your mind and body to respond to stress in healthy, healing ways.
Finding Yourself, Loving Yourself
They say “just be yourself” but how do you do that? What will happen if some people don’t seem to like you, or if you don’t even like yourself sometimes? For many of us, who we are is locked away in the attic, buried under years of old memories. Getting really clear about who I am significantly changed my life trajectory.
Yoga Inspired
My counselling practice is gently connected to my Yoga practice. The wisdom of the ancients has always inspired me to keep finding my way back to the path of right living. The word ha-tha meaning sun-moon is a constant and loving reminder to me that everything in nature is both light and dark. When we reduce anything to just one single aspect, we lose sight of it’s truth. And the truth is actually often less painful than the illusion we were living in.