Specializing in Person-Centered Care
Anxiety
Do you ever find yourself in a familiar setting, and still your heart is racing? Maybe you struggle to sit still when doing homework or watching a movie. Possibly, you just wish sometimes you could 'turn off' your overthinking brain...
Anxiety is a real thing, and 'just stop' is not an option, no matter how much the people we care about wish it was.
Starting to build awarenesses of anxiety is the first step in building skills to managing anxiety.
Depression
Laying in bed for hours, unable to sleep. Doomscrolling till your thumbs hurt. Mood eating or not eating at all. Snapping at people you love, and you don’t know why. Sadness can feel so big, you may actually feel like your body physically hurts. This is not your imagination.
A reminder, being told to 'just stop being sad' doesn’t feel helpful when someone's pain feels so real.
The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging it.
Couples & Family Dynamics
Positive
Parenting
Relationships
Our lives are filled with relationships we need to manage. Whether it is a significant other, a boss or landlord, or our morning barista.
Communication with others can feel intimidating. Well-thought out thoughts can be heard wrong. If our communication style fails us, nothing else matters.
Working on strategies for managing effective communication can help all relationships.
Gender &
Sexuality
Deciding to initiate couple's therapy has different meanings when it is at the beginning of a relationship, versus a relationship that is struggling. It requires a counselor who has experience in helping families with managing family dynamics. Frequently, when a coupled relationship is seeking help, there are outside forces touching the relationship, and those outside forces could be having positive impacts for one person, and less positive for others. Having open and honest conversations, with help, can make all the difference.
Positive parenting relies on effective communication. Parents who continue to model 20th century parenting with their 21st century children may be struggling. Children today are digital natives, and as parents, it is essential that we are able to talk in ways our children can hear and understand us. Building meaning in the communication is key to effectiveness.
Positive Parenting teaches effective communication, lens-sharing, and effective discipline.
*Group therapy course available
Is there anything more individualized than figuring out about our own gender and sexual identities? These are baseline identifiers in our lives, and with the current political climate as it is, it may feel like everyone you know, and everyone you don't know have their own insights and opinions on who you date, play with, and fall in love with.
Gender and sexuality touches so many aspects of our lives. Processing on everything will help make it feel more manageable.
Trauma
A trauma event is a shocking and dangerous event that you see, or that happens to you. Re-experiencing trauma is when you continue to experience events that feel like you or others are in danger. Trauma response is what you do next.
When past traumas are regularly relived, the impacts can be extremely negative to daily living. Experiencing flashbacks of past events can be crippling, and the fear you are experiencing is real. In therapy, we can work to contain and protect emotions, then work on strategies to manage daily functioning.
Drugs & Alcohol
When anxiety and depression take over, all emotions feel magnified. It is easy to distract or suppress emotions we don't want to deal with, by reaching for something that distracts us from feeling. And as that experience feels successful, the easier it is to rely on it.
Your therapist has extensive experience working in both inpatient and outpatient agency addiction models.
The first step is setting goals that you feel are meaningful.
Men's Issues
Growing up, so many young boys were told that 'real men don't cry,' or to walk it off, or worse. But anger and violence was, boys will be boys. Or maybe you always felt uncomfortable in that world and did not know why.
Today you continue struggling to navigate all those emotions around your childhood, and maybe even isolate, rather than risk getting in trouble again.
Working on men's issues can feel complicated and frustrating. You can come discuss, without stressing about the response.