MOOD + ANXIETY CONCERNS.
DEPRESSION
One in three individuals experiences some form of depression or other at some point of their lives.
Depression can include a debilitating lack of energy that can make everything seem impossible. Your energy is drained. Your mind is taken over by negative and defeatist thoughts that loop into a system that makes you see the world as a hopeless and pointless experience.
This can begin to make you feel that life is not worth living, experiencing passive hopes of death and, in some cases, wanting to end your life.
Sometimes depression appears as a one-time event, mostly related to circumstances. Some symptoms of depression appear in people suffering burnout.
A series of depressions that you suffer over an extended period of time is often sign of a more serious condition that may need to be medicated.
Many physical ailments have depression correlated with them. These include heart conditions, hypothyroid conditions, and deficiencies in vitamin B12, D, and Selenium.
Ruling these out when you start treatment will assure that we are treating the proper concern. Lack of sleep can be a symptom of depression, or can result in depression, which can be relieved after rectifying your sleep.
You can overcome all that.
There are many ways in which you can deal with depression. The goals are to help you regain a feeling of mastery over your life that can lift some of the weight off your shoulders, enhance your self-esteem, change your mood, and also give you mental room to examine what is making you feel so poorly.
There are many effective treatments for depression. These include Psycho-dynamic psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques such as Cognitive-restructuring, mindfulness, exercise, yoga, medication, nauropathic medicine, Trans-Cranial Direct Stimulation (Tcds) and homeopathy.
I like to start with psychotherapy paired with exercise, followed by behavioral activation. This is a technique where you and I agree on acting against your feelings and following scheduled activities. We start very small with things such as exercise. Then we add things to your schedule that you did with pleasure before your depression hit.
Medication is something that I notice many people are prejudiced against. Popular thinking about medication is plagued with erroneous information. For example, modern anti-depressants are not addictive. There are a wide variety of medications nowadays, so your doctor can find one that works for your body and has little or no side effects.
We will also go over lifestyle changes that can help you feel better and stay well.
NOTE: Highly sensitive individuals with adverse childhood experiences are more likely to suffer from depression, but seem to benefit more and faster from psychotherapy.
Working with me to stop the energy drain of depression will give you back your energy so you can enjoy your life.
ANXIETY and FEAR
Anxiety is an emotional loop that can result from being "conditioned" to feel apprehension or fear about something that has not yet happened. It can also be the result of organic processes in your body, such as endocrine changes, or the result of too much exposure to Fight+Flight+Freeze response due to heightened stressors or early adverse events.
I will first offer to use mindfulness, CBT, DBT or talk therapy to help you dismantle automatic emotional responses, which can be very distressing to experience.
After we know you are safe emotionally, we will examine your experience of specific events to understand what cognitive associations and emotional responses you have formed to them. In some cases we will generate custom experiments or exercises to progressively help you reduce the impact of intense sensations, feelings and bodily responses. We might use narrative, arts or journaling to record your thoughts and work through the experience in order to re-frame it safely.
In highly sensitive individuals, sometimes anxiety is misdiagnosed.
Working with me to overcome feelings of anxiety and fear will help you free your energies so you can feel better about yourself and move on.
Adverse Life Events + Trauma
If you went through an intense, dangerous, and fearful situation, but were prevented from activating what your body’s alarm system turned-on protect you, such as fighting, running away, or collapsing, many people develop what is called trauma.
If as a child you were exposed to toxic stress due to difficult migrations, abusive parents, bullying, or exposure to domestic violence, it is possible you may be suffering from the effects of trauma. These manifest in recurring and intrusive memories, repeating nightmares, hyper-vigilance, shutting down, going from 1 to 10 in no time, and constant levels of anxiety.
For some individuals, trauma can come from serious and horrible experiences such as rape, torture, dangerous migrations, accidents, war and other major events.
For highly sensitive individuals, trauma may happen even if for others the situation might not be as traumatic. This is real, and disturbing, because having more susceptibility to be affected by one’s environment can be an advantage in positive environments, but can be more difficult to handle in negative situations.
One of my interests is helping my patients find ways to overcome traumatic events. I use mindfulness, distress tolerance and emotion regulation (DBT skills) to help you learn ways to manage your overactive Fight+Flight+Freeze response.
I also work with a variety of somatic, expressive and image based techniques that help the body-mind system heal and create new pathways that offer alternative responses and behaviors to post-traumatic stress triggers.
Other strategies might consist of noticing whether you have any thinking patterns that fall into traps typical of trauma experiences.
Shame, for example, is a feeling that is common in trauma survivors. Feeling confused about one’s feelings towards one’s family is also pretty common. On one hand one may love the person, and simultaneously be angry at them for actions they may have perpetrated.
The last twenty years have yielded a rich amount of information and techniques that address how neuro-plasticity, or the brain’s capacity to grow and change, can be harnessed to create new ways of experiencing the world and better ways to address and respond to stress.
Many studies have shown how becoming aware of how the body stored the experience can be helpful to disarm the “emergency response” and access less activating modes of being.
I am constantly developing my awareness in the field, and learning new ways to help you.
I have extensive experience working with trauma.