“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely, to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
–Rumi
Are you stuck with or contemplating:
- Body/mind challenges such as auto-immune disorders, Cancer diagnosis and survival challenges
- Anxiety or Depression that deaden and debilitate?
- Trauma: in its various and sundry forms stemming from family, from life, and from community
- Loss and Grief
Relationship Issues:
- Considering divorce or separation?
- Work/career impasse or malaise
- Life transitions such as empty nesting, retirement, older parent decline
- Parenting issues that seem overwhelming and never-ending with tough adolescent challenges
- Brain function challenges such as ADD, ADHD, memory challenges, brain fog, headaches
Spiritual questions such as:
- What is my essential meaning?
- How do I do this loneliness?
Death and Bereavement:
- Are you facing a life threatening illness where you know the disease may be terminal?
- Are you worried about how your family, possibly your children will manage without you?
- Are you experiencing fear and anxiety regarding your passing and know it is extremely difficult for your family and friends to support your talking about your dying?
- Perhaps you are a family member of someone who is dying and you would like some coaching on how to manage this process, including your own feelings?
- Do you want to talk, but don’t know how to start, or don’t know what to say?
- As the Dying Person, do you feel guilty about putting your loved ones through this?
- Do you have unfinished business with the person who is dying, or, as the Dying Person, do you have unfinished business with a family member or a friend?
A typical session:
Is atypical as you present with your unique story, with your set of challenges gifts, strengths and limitations. However, we begin with:
- Discussion of your issue(s) as it is on this day and clarifying what you want to get from the session
- Using one or two of the psychotherapy methods that are appropriate for you, the issue, and your learning style, deepening into the issue…. This can include body-mind awareness, working with a dream, working with different aspects of personality but always with an eye and ear to the “stuck” places, to points of change and transformation, of problem-solving from a new view.
- Developing the skill of listening to one’s self with acceptance, love and grace—so different from the harsh critic so many have as a restraining voice in the “mess” of life.
- Concluding the session with reflections on applications to your daily world—your community and family life. Asking, “How will you bring your new awareness to your external life? Support in determining the how-to’s for proceeding in one’s external world.
“If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.”
–Chinese Proverb
What is Psychotherapy:
Psychotherapy is the “….caterpillar metamorphosis to butterfly…”, while the internal and external world problems and struggles are explored and resolved.
Body work Psychotherapy—a mix of talking, and body-oriented awareness using breath and focussing, teaches one how to access the inner, intuitive self. It teaches self-awareness; it helps one deal with emotional, stuck patterns, by sidestepping old routines and old patterns of thinking. The process builds trust and self-confidence. It provides a pathway for attitude shifts, for developing and growing into the “full/true you”. If you have a problem with loss and grief, are recovering from surgery or have family and relational issues, Bodywork Psychotherapy might be the choice for you. With a trusted “witness”/therapist one learns alternate ways to solve problems, to unwind from one’s stuck places. No cookie cutter process here, just the gentle, firm work of exploring and discovering the essence.
With over 20 years experience as a Psychotherapist, 12 years as a Life Coach, 7 years as a Career Coach, and 6 years experience as a Cancer Coach, I bring a solid heart-centred approach and skill set to working with you and your story. Each path, each protocol, evolves out of the engagement in your meaning and your unique, individual story and experience. My creative edge is perceiving what makes you uniquely you and bringing the psychotherapy tools to support that unfolding.
Addressing Death and Dying, Bereavement and Loss
Death and Dying is part of the Life Cycle. It is also frightening, threatening, and typically we do what we can to push any sights or sounds of death away, until we are at the funeral home. Yet, this difficult phase, the last phase for the one who is leaving, also affords opportunities for concluding one’s sojourn on this earth peacefully. In some traditions it is said that finding ways to make peace and find resolution to one’s life journey, make this transition easier for those one loves—ones friends and family, and sets the energetic tone for the world/community around the Dying Person. In other words, one contributes to the good Karma.
“The dying need the friendship of the heart— its qualities of care, acceptance, vulnerability, but they also need the skills of the mind— the most sophisticated treatment that medicine has to offer. On its own, neither is enough.”
–Dame Cicely Saunders [from What Dying People Want, by David Kuhl
PSYCHOTHERAPY TESTIMONIALS
“I was seeing Deborah regularly when my son was a teenager. I practiced what I was learning about myself at home. And now eighteen years later I hear my son saying similar things to his new wife……It helps. It’s part of my life process. And now it’s a part of my son’s. I learned to listen to my intuition, my emotional world, but stop getting so caught in old messages. I know what matters to me, in a more personal and deeply connected way.”
–former Psychotherapy client
Other resources:
Kristi Magraw, RMT. www.KeepingtheBodyinmind.net
Don Warrington, Marital and Family Therapist www.psychotherapypathtoronto.ca