Trauma can be understood as an emotional reaction to a highly distressing experience, often resulting in feelings of intense fear and/or helplessness. Trauma can also result from a collection of experiences involving abuse or neglect. I will work with you to understand your traumatic experiences and their continued influence on your life, and ultimately help you integrate new learning to facilitate recovery from traumatic symptoms.

Anxiety is a normal reaction to perceived threats and can involve tension, worried thoughts, and physical symptoms like a rapid heart beat or tight chest. This can cause further issues such as insomnia, concentration difficulties, fatigue, and irritability. We will work together to identify the sources of your anxious thoughts or fears and develop plans to decrease your distress, increase your confidence, and implement more effective coping strategies.

Depression can be one of the most debilitating experiences a person can go through in life. It saps our motivation, takes away our ability to experience joy, and effectively shrinks the world around us. The good news is that depression is highly treatable. We will work together to change unhelpful thought patterns contributing to your depressed mood while increasing your activity level to connect with more positive and rewarding experiences. 

We all experience sleep problems from time-to-time, but sometimes these sleep problems can continue for weeks or months and begin to significantly impact our work, relationships, and wellbeing. Starting with assessment tools to uncover specific problems with sleep (e.g., difficulty falling asleep, not feeling refreshed, waking up often), we will put together a plan to target these problem areas and improve your sleep. 

Grief is a natural response to loss and involves painful emotions that will often improve with time. However, sometimes these painful emotions will remain for long periods of time and impact our lives in profound ways. I will be there to listen to your story, help you to develop insight into the personal meanings of your loss, and ultimately reconstruct painful narratives to unlock your natural healing potential. 

CBT looks at the interconnected nature of our thinking, behaviour, and emotions to better understand the development of negative mood states (e.g., anxiety or depression). Interventions primarily involve exploring changes to unhelpful thinking patterns and/or behaviours to reduce symptoms, and to help individuals develop more effective coping strategies to become more effective in their lives.

DBT is a type of cognitive behavioural therapy that focuses on developing mindfulness, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and emotional regulation. Specifically, interventions are primarily designed to help people effectively cope with stress, better regulate their emotions, and improve their relationships.

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is a standardized 12-session psychotherapy protocol that helps people recover from trauma and PTSD by teaching them to evaluate and change upsetting, unhelpful, and inaccurate thoughts and beliefs that have emerged since experiencing trauma. You can learn more about CPT here (please note that you will be redirected to a new page).

EMDR is a highly structured and effective mode of therapy that is primarily focused on alleviating distress associated with disturbing memories. It involves deliberate focus on the disturbing aspects of memories while simultaneously having clients follow therapist directed eye movements for rapid processing of the disturbing material. If you are interested in learning more, you can check out a brief brochure about EMDR here, and a more detailed description of the EMDR process can be found here. Please also check out the FAQ section of this website for some more information about EMDR.