Below are short descriptions of my areas of expertise:

Psychotherapy for Individuals
Marriage and Couples’ Counselling
Health Counselling

 

 

Psychotherapy for Individuals

Your relationship is in trouble. You’re having serious conflicts at work. You’re feeling anxious or depressed. These are common reasons for people to seek therapy.

Therapy is a way of uncovering the roots of the issues that make you unhappy. It’s also about discovering who you are at your very core. It takes courage to look inside yourself that deeply and to come face-to-face with your deepest fears and core attitudes. But that journey can also be immensely satisfying, even life changing. Some people view it as a gift to themselves and an investment in their happiness and well-being.

Once you understand the causes of your stress or pain or anger, you’re better able to manage those feelings when they arise. It’s not that you’ll never be stressed or hurt or angry again, but you’ll be able to cope with your feelings and manage them more effectively. That, in the field of psychotherapy, is called achieving greater self-awareness. What follows can be a more fulfilling life.

 

Psychotherapy for Couples

There are good reasons why so many relationships don’t seem to work. In North American culture, the 1960s and '70s promoted leaving relationships that weren’t working. But, in the two-and-a-half decades that have followed, as a culture, we have yet to define what does work.

To understand whether a relationship can or cannot work, we need to understand more about how the individuals involved feel about intimacy and relating. For example, I often hear, “If a relationship is this hard, it wasn’t meant to be.” That is a core belief that you carry with you into relationships. It’s also a fantasy of our culture that relationships should be easy.

In life, anything you want to achieve takes a lot of hard work. So, before you decide that a relationship isn’t working, you need to understand the nature of your core beliefs, and your partners’, to know what you’re dealing with, how these issues might affect your relationship and whether or not the issues can be resolved.

In marital or couples’ therapy, you will learn self-reflection, patience, a sense of fair play, the ability to negotiate and the desire to celebrate being together with your partner – skills that many of us didn’t witness in childhood.

 

Health Counselling 

This is another one of my areas of expertise. I first developed my understanding of health-related issues when I studied nursing. I have since trained in numerous other disciplines, including Transactional Analysis, Jungian and analytical psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, cognitive therapy, systematic relaxation, anger management, chronic pain management and mind-body therapies such as mindfulness meditation, Hakomi and Feldenkrais.

Chronic illness creates significant, high-level stresses that can affect your day-to-day functioning in major ways. It affects your ability to work, to be mobile and independent, thus removing choices in your life and sometimes isolating you from family, friends and colleagues. When dealing with a chronic illness, not only do you need more care but you also lose the ability to give care to others. That can seriously change the nature of your relationships.

These realities have undeniable ramifications. They determine whether people will stick with you, whether you can earn an income, even whether you can afford the cost of being ill. It’s no wonder that chronic illness often makes us feel powerless, helpless, angry, anxious and afraid and leaves us feeling depressed. These are the emotional impacts of illness that I help my clients – and often their families – cope with. Through therapy, my clients can avoid having illness dominate their lives and learn to live well.