Working with Stress
Feeling stressed?
Stress impacts all of us at different times in our busy lives. We live in a society that values doing more, being more, outputting more. This takes a toll on our ability to function, let alone our ability to feel content.
Work, family life, personal relationships, physical health… keeping on top of all of these areas can be next to impossible. In therapy, we slow down to assess how you’re actually doing in each of these areas.
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How stress works
When stress becomes too much
Stress involves being under sustained pressure in a demanding environment. I think we just described modern society in one sentence there.
While you think you may be able to define stress, we as therapists are more concerned with how stress impacts you specifically. How does stress show up in your body? What happens to your thoughts when you’re more stressed than usual? How do you cope with stress, and how would you prefer to cope with stress?
Many clients come to see us because they feel overwhelmed with life and feel unable to cope. Many start out in therapy disconnected from what’s going on around them and what’s going on inside of them. That’s how we work with stress at Levity Counselling Serivces; we try to connect you to what’s happening around you so that you can cope better.
Working with Stress
Working with stress at Levity
We’re trained as therapists to tailor our treatment to your unique needs. This means we can’t give one solid “This is how we work with stress all the time always” claim here. We can tell you that we most often work with life stress in these ways:
- We’ll discuss what you’re experiencing and give you information that helps you understand your experience better
- We’ll work on getting to know yourself and your stress cues (e.g., what do your thoughts do when work is particularly stressful? Are you particularly irritable when your kids have been sick for the last two weeks? Yep, that tracks)
- We’ll have you noticing how you react to stressors in your life
- We will be there with you as you develop a way of responding differently to your stress, being kinder to yourself and adjusting your expectations for yourself
- We’ll try our very best to remind you of the societal, structural forces that contribute to your stress that are outside of you
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