Private Sessions vs. Group Work:
Here are some things to consider when choosing between group work and private sessions:
Private Sessions
Private sessions are best suited when you have:
- Acute or long-standing suffering
- Limited time / want faster results, e.g.:
- Starting a new job or study program,
- Readying for a new family member or marriage
- Learning of a life-threatening illness
- Facing end of life issues
- Highly complex situations
- A history of trauma (including personal or family addiction issues)
- Brain health issues that impact your life
Group Work
Sometimes, the power of a group is the best way to reduce isolation and to remind yourself that you are not alone in your suffering or challenges. Sharing resources, strategies, encouragement and hope with others in similar situations can be an important way to begin the process of healing and improving your life situation.
If you would like to know more about the therapeutic and educational groups I am running with my team, please click here to find out about our community at aBETTERme, and current group offerings.
What type of clients do I work with?
Parents
Parents wanting to cope better with difficult family dynamics, challenging situations, or with their own confusion and burnout.
By helping you connect to yourself with compassion, you are better able to connect with your children, and offer them calm, guidance, and discipline.
Caregivers
Caregivers and friends of people living with mental health challenges.
By offering education and support to you that is specifically geared to caregivers, I support you to maintain or improve your own health, as well as the health of the loved one you are caring for.
Caregivers who have the privilege of helping elders face physical and cognitive decline.
I support spouses, siblings, friends and relatives of older adults to learn how to care for themselves. The journey of responding with love, joy, preparedness and intelligence to the challenges posed by declining health can be both beautiful and difficult, and I would like to help you make it the best it can be.
Health
People facing (or who have faced) life-threatening illness in themselves or others.
By reframing illness and learning mindfulness, doing guided imagery or practicing other forms of brain health techniques, anyone can enhance their well-being mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
Brain Health
People with recent or past traumatic brain injuries, stroke, dementia, Parkinsons, etc.
People with diagnoses or suspected diagnoses of cognitive, attentional, and mental health issues.
By learning how to function optimally in their daily lives, and how to live from the inside out, you are better able to find your talents, strengths and abilities within your neurodiversity. ADD/ADHD, depression, anxiety, autism, and others.
I support you to learn to live from the inside out- finding your talents, strengths and abilities in their neurodiversity e.g. ADD/ADHD, depression, anxiety, autism, learning “disabilities” = different abilities.
Developmental Trauma
People raised in homes where addiction, mental health issues or inter-generational trauma have caused them pain, suffering, and have contributed to them having traits and ways of being that hurt them.
If this is part of your history, you may have unconsciously chosen one or more forms of dependency in your adult life (e.g. addiction, rejecting relationships, self-sacrificial lifestyles that induce stress-related illness) that keep you feeling shame, blame, abandonment and despair. I work with “adult children” to heal from chronic PTSD, depression and self-harming behaviours and personality traits.
Difficult Life Transitions
People going through difficult life transitions such as divorce, immigration, retirement, returning to work after health crises, etc.
These challenges can be great opportunities to make positive change and may be a good time to give yourself extra support.
It would be my privilege to facilitate your well-being through talk therapy, guided imagery, and brain health practices. Together we can help you learn and develop greater confidence to bring your best self to meet the challenges and opportunities you are facing. Here are some of the most powerful and preferred tools I draw on from the fields of psychotherapy, coaching, and neurofeedback to meet your needs and preferences:
Coherence Therapy and Appreciative Coaching
Become more aware of what you believe to be most important to you, and how you may or may not be living in coherence with these needs, values, and ideals. Appreciate the strengths, talent and knowledge you already possess, and align them with new strategies for increasing how often, and how long you stay in your chosen states, behaviours, activities, relationships and practice applying these strategies in real time.
Neurofeedback and Brain Health Practices
Train the brain to regulate itself better so you can increase your neurological strength, flexibility and resilience. As an Othmer trained neurofeedback practitioner, my training has been rigorous, and I can work toward improving stability of various physical processes like sleep, digestion, recovery from traumatic brain injury; increasing executive functioning, attentional and mood regulation; unlearning habits and addictions; decreasing dysregulation due to developmental trauma; and supporting optimal subcortical processing to reduce “fight or flight” responses. This is an evidence based best practice for ADD/ADHD, several mood disorders, and PTSD, to name only a few conditions which have improved in my practice to date.
Cognitive Behavioural and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy
Pay attention to the automatic negative thinking which informs how you react emotionally and physically to most situations. Gain more freedom of choice of your responses by slowing down and guiding these responses consciously. Learn how to accept and live well with the duality of positive and negative states that exist in most experiences.
Dialogical Therapy
Generate new possibilities for relating to your social experiences by exploring the meaning you give them. Open new and creative ways to interact with what you may see as fixed problems in your life.
Trauma “Parts Work”
Learn to become aware of, reassure, and redirect parts of the self which are formed as a result of coping with trauma, and which automatically direct you to apply those coping strategies, whether or not they are harmful to your present self and situation.
Guided Imagery
Working in the symbolism of waking dreams, you can use inherent wisdom beyond your defenses to resolve many issues you are facing. This may include seeing and experiencing healing of difficult emotions related to illness, resolutions to dilemmas, and a reorienting of the self as integrated for those with a traumatic past.*
*Under private tutelage by the late Mme Colette Albouker-Muscat z’l and her protoges, I learned to use her system of waking dream therapy which she developed as a student of Robert Desoille, at the Sorbonne. He was a French psychotherapist known for his developing “directed waking dream” (or RED). Parallels have been drawn between Desoille’s work and Milton H. Erickson, as well as neuro-linguistic programming. Traditionally incorporated into psychoanalysis, Mme Colette innovated an approach to dissolving learned reflexes (i.e. learned behaviours and emotions) drawing heavily on the brain’s patterns of regeneration of the body for physical illness and disease treatment. Today, I draw heavily on Colette’s work with a process called “Reversal” in which a client is facilitated to trace difficulties (physical, emotional and spiritual) back to root causes, heal them in a waking dream state using the knowledge inherent in the wisdom of the adult self, and see the process of that healing express itself in new resolutions to difficulties, stretching from childhood all the way into the present.
Given the need to practice social distancing and quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic, all services are offered remotely, and in-person services have been suspended for the time being. Othmer Method Neurofeedback, and other machinery which I have available at my clinic cannot be accessed right now. However, the machinery required for these methods may be rented separately. Some of these treatments are uniquely valuable, however, alternative adjunct therapies can be used to support the psychotherapeutic process in their place during this time.