Chantel has worked in the psychology world for over 5 years as a supervisor in psychological assessment. Chantel is on her counselling journey with Kells Counselling as a student mental health therapist.
Chantel believes life is much like a job. She says, “there are learning moments. There are growing moments. And there are moments when we experience success or challenges. Most importantly, every job has tasks. Some job tasks we master quickly. We have all the skills that we need to do the task and to do it well. But then sometimes, we get thrown a new task that is hard to master. Maybe we do not have the skills that we need. Maybe we have the skills, but we just don’t know how to use them. Or maybe we need training, but it turns out that the people around us don’t really have the skills either.”
Whatever the issues may be, Chantel believes that counselling is a way that people can learn skills, figure out how to use the skills that they already have, and get the training that they need. It is Chantel’s hope that she can help clients to discover their skills and what specific training they may need. Chantel believes that this is the way people can manage the hard tasks life throws their way.
Chantel says she is growing as a student therapist and is learning to work with individuals who are dealing with:
- Stress, fatigue, and burnout.
- Anxiety and nervousness.
- Relationship struggles and/or attachment issues.
- Low mood, low energy, or depression.
- Family changes like divorce or separation.
- Grief or the loss of a loved one.
- Big life changes or overwhelming life changes.
- Difficulty setting boundaries at work or with friends and family.
- Challenges with intense emotions like anger.
- Trauma or adversity.
- Low self-esteem or low self-confidence.
Chantel is training to practice a variety of therapy methods and thereby learning many different skills to apply to different types of life challenges. Those therapies include:
- Cognitive behavior therapy, also known as CBT. This therapy works with thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. It can help individuals to learn how to stop negative thoughts that may circle around in their heads or the worst-case scenarios that pop up when something in life changes. It teaches ways to change thinking patterns and results in acting differently and feeling better.
- Dialectical behavior therapy, also known as DBT. This therapy can teach a lot, like how to set boundaries, communicate in a way so that messages are clear and will be well-received, think and act calmly, and calm emotions inside of the body.
- Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, also known as EMDR. This therapy takes the ‘trauma’ out of ‘trauma memories’, so all that remains is the memory. Individuals remember what happened, but now when they think about it, fear, anger, and anxiety are much less or sometimes gone!
- Solution-focused therapy, also known as SFT or Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT). SFT is short and teaches skills to work through small roadblocks or problems. SFT walks individuals through different skills so they can reach goals. It doesn’t help in the long run, but sometimes it is important to work through problems while they are happening to enable individuals to begin to work through the tough stuff.
- Mindfulness. Mindfulness teaches ways to slow down one’s thinking and to be present in the moment. Some people love this and other people not so much. When individuals learn how to slow down, breathe, notice the clouds moving in the sky or the breeze flowing in from the window, it is easier to slow down, breathe, and handle other challenges in life also.
- Rogerian therapy. This therapy is for those individuals who just need someone to listen. Life is hard and at the end of the day, knowing that someone is listening and really ‘gets it’ is enough.