Psychotherapy Toronto

Psychotherapy is a talk-based therapy with the goal of improving and maintaining clients’ mental health and their sense of well-being.

I work collaboratively with clients to bring about positive changes in their thoughts, emotions, actions, and relationships. Most commonly, clients seek me out when one or more of these facets of their lives is negatively affecting their ability to live a life of meaning, contentment, ease or enjoyment. Clients often come to me when they are experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety, and when their relationships pose challenges to them that they have not been able to solve on their own.

THOUGHTS

Sometimes our thoughts can get the better of us. This often happens when we find ourselves stuck in thought loops where we find ourselves focusing on worst case scenarios. Often these thought patterns will relate to negative assumptions and fears about how we are viewed by others. At other times, there may be more specific fears that promote an overemphasis on fear, worry or panic.

These thought patterns are often overgeneralized responses to specific negative states we have experienced in the past and hope to avoid in the future. Unfortunately, these thought patterns are often maladaptive and are detrimental to our mental health, producing anxiety which becomes more and more difficult to moderate. At times, these thoughts can contribute to states of physiological panic.

I work with clients to identify unhelpful thought patterns, their origins as adaptive responses to experience, and new ways of interacting with thought that promote greater choice and control over how to respond to life situations.

EMOTIONS

Emotions are a vital and irreplaceable part of our attempts to understand and respond to our environment. They provide us with valuable evaluations of safety and security, especially in our social interactions with others. Emotions are also essential to reason. Research has shown that the loss of emotional processing centres in the brain lead to loss of logical decision-making abilities.

Our relationship with our own emotional lives, and those of others, is much more complicated, however. In order to make the most of our emotional capacities, we need to be able to tolerate their presence, differentiate between them, put language to them, and speak with composure and confidence to others about them in order to create shared meaning and understanding. Each of these aspects of emotional intelligence can sometimes pose challenges for us.

I work with clients to assess which of these aspects are leading to negative consequences and support them in nurturing their skills and abilities in those realms.

ACTIONS

Each of us make many choices every day which lead to action. On occasion, we experience distress in our lives as a result of the choices we make or the actions we take. Sometimes it is a result of acting in ways that feel out of alignment with our values, or it might be that our actions don’t make sense to us or to a loved one or that they feel out of control.

I support clients in gaining insight into the sometimes-hidden motivations that inform their actions, and help them clarify their values and intentions in order to live a life that more closely reflects their ideals. I also support my client's efforts to develop behavioural patterns and routines that promote their well-being, and to connect to meaningful sources of motivation they will need in order to see these changes through.

RELATIONSHIPS

Relationships define a significant part of our identities and our quality of life, and thus when relationships with loved ones are difficult there is often significant negative impacts to our mental health and our well-being. Clients often seek out my support when they are at a crossroads in their relationship, and need to find a new way forward. I also frequently work with clients after a recent breakup to either support them through their grieving process to their eventual return to dating, or to help them address challenges that led to the dissolution of their last relationship.

I work with clients to explore novel understandings of relationship dilemmas and explore a variety of possible approaches to resolve them. I draw from my experience as a couples therapist to support clients to be their best selves in relationships, and to make sense of the dilemmas they face.

Throughout all of these therapeutic conversations, I work to engender a greater sense of autonomy, capacity and confidence in my clients. I work holistically, moving back and forth between thought, emotion, action and relationship. I practice in a collaborative fashion: that is, I work to magnify my client’s efforts, to draw from their values and priorities, and to ensure that the understanding we create together of their problems and their solutions make sense to them. Additionally, my practice is trauma-informed in that I recognize traumatic experiences as a significant source of long term, and often intense, distress and challenge in my clients’ lives. In particular trauma related to attachment to our parents in our early lives, and experiences in which our physical or emotional safety are fundamentally compromised.