Counselling Services
Our counselling services assist people experiencing difficulties in relationships or within themselves. Counselling can enhance self-knowledge, emotional acceptance, growth, and well-being.
Online gestalt therapy and counselling makes use of relational, conversational, somatic, expressive, and educational methods and techniques. Our focus is on supporting people as they adjust to the medical, psychosocial, and vocational aspects of disability. We empower you to achieve your personal, career, and independent living goals.
We place emphasis on adapting to the stressors of life and creating wellness as a continual work-in-progress on a lifelong journey of recovery. Our counselling practice is informed by counselling and vocational psychology theories, the psychosocial rehabilitation and recovery model, research evidence, ethics, human diversity, lived experience, and a holistic healing traditions.
This is an opportunity to explore a variety of topics based on your identified issues, needs, and goals. You may want to explore your development, strengths or weaknesses, decision-making, coping skills, personal insights and knowledge, inner conflict, thoughts and beliefs, feelings and emotions, actions and behaviours, needs and goals, relationships, or living a more satisfying and resourceful life.
Please see the examples below of counselling services for anxiety, depression, trauma, and stress related mental health issues:
Counselling for Anxiety
We provide counselling for anxiety tailored to your individual needs. Our counselling sessions are designed to assist you with understanding and managing anxiety, providing you with coping strategies and support to navigate the challenges of fear and worry with resilience.
Anxiety can be described as an internally focused response to a vague, distant, or even unrecognized danger. It can involve losing a sense of control of oneself or a situation. It can be related to the perception of something bad happening.
It can affect our whole being and be experienced as a physiological, behavioral, and psychological reaction all at once. Symptoms may include bodily reactions, an inability to act, or difficulty responding to everyday situations.
This state of apprehension and uneasiness can lead to a feeling of detachment from self, fearfulness, or avoidance. Anxiety can appear in different forms and at different levels of intensity ranging from slight uneasiness to full-blown panic attacks. It may be free-floating, spontaneous, situational, phobic, or anticipatory.
Depending on your experience, the need to understand it and find relief can be very strong. Recovering from anxiety is possible with interventions at multiple levels: to reduce physiological reactivity; eliminate avoidance behavior; and change subjective interpretations (self-talk), which often trigger more worry.
Counselling for Depression
We provide counselling for depression. Sessions focus on addressing the root causes of depression, guiding you towards a path of self-discovery. Through a compassionate and empathetic approach, we work together to assist you with feelings that may include sadness and hopelessness. We encourage you to live with acceptance about past experiences and practice mindfulness for present moment experience.
Depression can be described as an experience that may include symptoms of feeling sad or hopeless, low energy, fatigue, or tiredness; slowness in thinking or action; loss of appetite or overeating; disturbed sleep or insomnia; and more. It can also be an understandable feeling of unhappiness in response to grief, loss of a loved person or object, or other events that are traumatic.
It can appear in different forms and and in different levels of intensity and duration. In some cases, a depressed mood may seem like a disproportionate response to the cause, because it is long-term or more severe in nature. Manic or bipolar types of depression may exist when a person alternates between feeling extremely sad and being inactive, followed by feeling very elated and being very active.
Many people experience depression at some time in their lives. It can be triggered on by events that lead to reactive depression; or where there appears to be no identifiable external causes, such as with endogenous (from inside) depression. Depression can come and go and it's not always clear why people react to experiences in different ways.
Counselling for Trauma and Stress
We offer counselling for trauma and stress. Recovery is often a dynamic, rather than linear process that we approach with sensitivity and care. Our counselling sessions aim to assist you to process and cope with stressors, recover from past traumas, and enable you to regain a sense of safety, trust, and emotional well-being. We provide a supportive environment for your healing journey.
Trauma can be described as a type of emotional and psychological wound or injury from exposure to an overwhelmingly stressful event or series of events. The event(s) that lead to a stress response can be mild, moderate, or severe. They cause distress because they are a perceived or real danger and threat to the self or others.
Traumatic experiences of being unsafe or harmed can overwhelm a person's ability to respond and cope.
With post traumatic stress, causes can be from a wide range of events that are intentional (deliberate or malicious), unintentional (accidental), or from acts of nature, like natural disasters. Either way, the trauma leaves a deep emotional wound.
These deep emotional wounds can result in a cycle of stress response that not only affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, but also a chain reaction between the psychological, neurological, and immune systems.
When our brain, limbic system (including hypothalamic and pituitary areas), and adrenals are activated in response to detecting stressors, our body is attempting to gather resources for survival. However, with long term stress response, the overproduction of hormones (such as cortisol) can lead to dysregulation, changes in mood, chronic health conditions, and other symptoms.