Everyone experiences stress in their day to day life. Stressful circumstances are unavoidable but we all spend a remarkable amount of time trying to avoid stressful or unpleasant circumstances, thoughts, or emotions. You can notice this in simple day to day things such as keeping the radio or TV on all the time or finding yourself in looking in the refrigerator when you are clearly not hungry. Often we focus on changing our circumstances in ways that we believe will lead to more peace and happiness. People say I’ll feel better when I get out of this job or get a new house or find the one to date or marry. This usually does not work well or if it does our efforts only produce temporary relief and then soon we are feeling stress and tense all over again.
In addition, the range of medical conditions that are either caused or exacerbated by stress is endless. Click here for a partial list. Amazingly many medical conditions are inadvertently caused by our efforts to avoid unpleasant experiences. People with frequent, chronic headaches worry about having pain. Chronic heart-burn creates worry about diet. All this worry creates more stress leading to more symptoms.
Angela specializes in helping people find peace in the midst of constant change and daily chaos. Counseling sessions are designed to teach clients how to break the cycle of stress and worry and not be so easily affected by daily circumstances that we cannot change.
What to Expect
Counseling is provided in a relaxed atmosphere and focuses on helping clients feel comfortable right from the beginning. Angela enjoys getting to know her clients well and laughing together but also values focusing on goals and making each session a productive one. The first few sessions are spent getting to know one another and helping Angela get a thorough understanding of the problems as well as clarifying goals for treatment. Although some suggested techniques may start helping right away, typically counseling is a treatment that works more slowly but often has more lasting positive effects than other treatments.
All of Angela’s clients who are experiencing pain or other medical conditions will be asked to have a full medical work up if they have not already. Angela often collaborates with other medical care providers that clients have seen already. In your first session you will be asked to identify and give written consent for Angela to contact other medical providers in order to allow for a multi-disciplinary team approach.
Approach to Counseling:
Angela operates from a holistic perspective and concerns herself with the clients’ overall, long-term well-being. Her approach focuses on solutions with specific, attainable goals. Generally therapy is more short term and ends when the client’s presenting issue is resolved.
Angela uses Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction to help patients with stress related medical conditions. This cutting edge approach has been shown to be highly effective in such cases.Mindfulness is often defined as “awareness of present experience with acceptance.” This present-focused perspective is developed using specific techniques taught in sessions and practiced at home. Over time clients develop new strategies to work with tension, worry, and discomfort with a growing sense of freedom and the possibility of new options. Clients are often able to release unnecessary tension that has been held in the body, work with discomfort that can’t be released, and increase awareness and learning from emotions that may have become entangled with their uncomfortable physical sensations.
Additionally, Angela may also incorporate marriage and family and cognitive approaches to help clients examine how their thoughts about their condition and habits to manage it affect their experiences
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** Mindfulness definition taken from The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems by Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD