Online Counselling Support
Greetings from the East Coast!
As I write this letter to my old friends and colleagues at KIHC in early May, this marks my 1.5-year anniversary here in Nova Scotia.
A lot has happened during this time. While continuing to provide remote counselling sessions for some of my old KIHC clients, I’ve extended my online practice for those living in remote areas of Atlantic Canada. With services reaching rural Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick, I’m proud to offer more affordable services for those who might not otherwise have access to mental health care.
In addition, I had the opportunity to return to Tanzania last year, launching “phase II” of a fundraising project that I began in 2008.
I am a bit in awe of how fast things can change. There have been many examples of this lesson in the last month, but the most impactful one for me is that “nothing is certain”. I thought I had already learned this lesson, but watching the dramatic changes to society and our community over the last few weeks has made me realize that I am still learning this lesson. Learning how to let go of the need for things to be certain and to be in control. Remembering that all I truly control is my inner state of being and reaction to the outside world. Inside all this uncertainty is a glimmer of hope for healing, that glimmer comes from solitude. 
I’m concerned by the sudden rise of debilitating anxiety in the patients who walk through my door. These people are feeling deeply unstable, ungrounded, and unsafe. Anxiety is harming their relationships with people, with food, and their environment. They’re confused by the cause of their anxiety and are hoping that I have a pill to take it away. Though I often suggest a pill to help, the real value in our work comes from identifying and treating the underlying source of anxiety. For those of you struggling with anxiety currently, I’m sharing some of the common contributing physical causes that are often overlooked. (In other words, it’s not “all in your head” and we can do something about it.) 
Having recently returned from a working holiday trip to Tanzania, a place that I visited in 2011 and that continues to draw me back, I’ve been reflecting on why it holds such appeal to me. One might think that volunteering at a children and women’s centre, housing a number of orphans and disadvantaged widows, would breed some pretty heavy emotions, but I beg to argue that the opposite can actually be true. 
I need to start this article with sharing my person bias: I love gardening. This hasn’t always been the case but a few years ago we started our own vegetable garden. Now I have the gardening “bug”. I have been delighted to find just how much peace and calm digging in the dirt gives me, not to mention the loads of fresh, healthy produce. I think you should start a garden too…
Apparently, the world record for the longest time staying awake, achieved by a teenager in in the 1960s, is 11 consecutive days. Can you imagine how awful he must have felt? How irritable, illogical, and accident-prone, he must’ve been? Even chronic, small bits of sleep deprivation are associated with development and progression of chronic illness, and about twice the risk of a car accident. And yet, 
By Lindsay Dupuis, M.A., C.C.C.
In my field of work, I see several clients struggling with chronic stress and anxiety. These individuals often find themselves pulled into habitual and problematic thinking patterns, which usually include (in cognitive behavioural therapy terms) catastrophic thinking, worrying and over-planning, should-ing, rumination, black and white thinking, and mind reading. Because thinking in this way has become quite automatic to the stressed or anxious individual, it can happen outside of their conscious awareness. Before realizing it,
Sarah Knight has recently brought an internationally-known therapeutic practice to the clinic, that focuses on healing uncomfortable family dynamics, including inherited patterns and traumas that go back generations. Some people and old-world medicines refer to this as resolving energy patterns carried forward from our ancestors. Science calls it epi-genetics.
I stepped in to the centre of the circle of people and my posture changed immediately. I slouched, my toes turned inward, and my gaze shifted fearfully towards the floor as I stood several paces away from both my “husband” and my “daughter”. My body became very much aware of a need to get her as close to me as possible, while steering well clear of his strong presence.