How I can help
People I’ve helped often started off with:
- life having the color drained out of it
- overwhelm from current events or responsibilities
- “brain fog”, or problems focusing
- painful memories they struggled to make sense of and put to rest
- disrupted sleep
- chronic health issues (for example, pain, incompletely healed injuries, metabolic and digestive disorders – I am not a doctor and don’t diagnose medical issues, but I do deal with the mental side of issues like this)
- problems in their friendships and relationships
- feeling painfully set apart from or different than other people
- difficulty setting and sticking with goals
- a feeling of lacking direction, purpose or meaning
Descriptions like these cut across almost all diagnosable mental illnesses, including depression, anxiety, PTSD and other trauma-related disorders, ADHD, personality disorders and so on. We may arrive at a formal diagnosis, but that’s not necessarily the very best possible guide for how we can work.
Subjective states of being like those in the list above are in my opinion often closer to the core of what it is to have a thing you want to go to therapy for: gaining hope for resolving them means your life is already improving, and moving through them to a successful conclusion means that your life is now where you have been wanting it to get to.
After working with me for multiple sessions, people with subjectively stated issues like above who reached a state of resolution would say things like:
- It’s easier to get out of bed in the morning.
- I enjoy things again.
- Life can be stressful but I’m usually confident I can roll with it.
- The things that have been bothering me constantly have softened and faded into things I can live with.
- I feel like I’m back in the driver’s seat.
- My responsibilities are manageable.
- I remember my past, and maybe sometimes it still hurts, but it doesn’t rule my present anymore.
- I feel better about who I am.
- I’m more at peace with people around me.
- The things I’m doing and the story I’m living out feel like they matter.