Experience Treating: Anxiety, Depression, Chronic Pain, Relationship Stress and more
Anxiety
A little anxiousness, sometimes, is healthy. That's our body's instincts keeping us alive!
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However, anxiety can be persistent enough to make you doubt yourself, feel like it's holding you back, or even feel crippling at times.
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I'm no stranger to the effects. I also want you to know that you do not have to live your day ruled by anxiety. I want to help you be the card dealer (metaphorically speaking) in your daily game with anxiety. Maybe even feel like you can win the game.
Depression
Feeling under the weather, down in the dumps, stuck in a rut? Have you lost interest in doing things that used to bring you joy?
These are all signs of possible depressed mood and depression. Depression is an associated chemical and energetic imbalance in the brain and body that causes us to react with survival instincts. This can often look like or include low self esteem and self worth and lack of confidence.
We don’t just want to survive life though, we want to thrive! I would like to help you realize your options and abilities and experience a realistic amount of joy and happiness again.
Relationship Stress
Family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, all of the communication and interaction with these different people takes a lot of effort!
There’s self awareness and social awareness, verbals and non-verbals, and many choices that go into engaging in these relationships and making them healthy and effective. Not to mention the emotions that automatically accompany an interaction based on our history with the person.
It would be my pleasure to process your experience of a relationship in your life and explore communication strategies that could help you work together (or not) and feel better. Note: see couples counseling under the contra indicated heading below.
Chronic Pain
As autonomous human beings we are naturally attracted towards control. Generally, the more control of our environment, emotions, and sensations we have, the more satisfied we are.
Chronic pain is a constant reminder and an extreme case of limited control. This can lead to anger, sadness, and dissatisfaction affecting our overall mood. Processing your situation and implementing strategies for pain management (in addition to doctor and physical health specialist instructions) has been shown to significantly improve one’s quality of life and emotional experience while living with chronic pain.
If you are affected by chronic pain, then I encourage you to take one more step towards getting some relief and contact me today.
Sleep
I have additional training and experience utilizing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) methods and strategies to improve the amount and quality of sleep that you achieve in a night. Sleep concerns often come with dual disorder symptoms like depression or anxiety. Sleep is vitally important for mental health.
I practice approaching sleep concerns from an all encompassing mental health standpoint to facilitate effective lasting results.
Anything Causing You STRESS!
The concerns I focus on are not limited to those outlined above.
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Any abnormal or undue stress, which can manifest in many different ways, is absolutely appropriate to discuss with a confidant and/or counselor. Sometimes we may feel like a problem is too small to seek counseling or we tell ourselves that others have it worse and to suck it up. Actually a neutral, objective, supportive, third party can be exactly what you need to loosen the brainstorming gears that are stuck in your head and help you decompress all the information that your brain has combined into stress.
Contra-Indicated
Couples counseling
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Straight up, couples counseling is an art and a specialty. It has specific training and methods which I am not professionally confident to perform. I would be happy to work with you as an individual to consider personal challenges and barriers to improving your relationship as a couple. If you are committed to online counseling as a couple (which is a great idea!) then I recommend these databases. Michigan residents, non-Michigan residents
Severe anxiety and/or depression
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The symptoms of severe anxiety and depression are life altering and can spiral out of control quickly. In these cases, counseling with closer and more immediate contact and support than online-email counseling is more appropriate and effective. Contact me for a brief consult to explore if online email counseling could be right for you!
Children and adolescents
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As technologically savvy as young people are nowadays, email counseling creates a comprehension barrier between children and counselors that makes email counseling inappropriate for young children. While adolescents are generally able to convey more feeling and meaning in their typed narrative, naturally adolescent emotions fluctuate rapidly and sometimes unexpectedly which requires a level of care not supported by the unstructured response time of online-email counseling. Online-email counseling also makes parental involvement and coordination challenging. For more information about teen counseling I recommend this post.
Suicidal ideation and self harm
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Individuals who are actively suicidal or have recently been suicidal or are actively engaging in physical self harm cannot be adequately served by online-email counseling and should seek a closer contact level of service. If you need to speak to someone about these feelings and behaviors now, click here for a list of contacts.