Counselling Helps Us Heal the Body
When you think of healing your body, you often don't think about counselling. More likely, you'll consider other important things like nutrition, exercise, medicine, naturopathy, or acupuncture. However, we are learning more and more about the mind-body connection (Dossett & Fricchione, 2020) and how a holistic approach to health and wellness often produces the best outcomes.
If you struggle with common physical concerns, like exhaustion, digestion issues, chronic pain, or difficulty sleeping, there is often both a physiological and a mental/emotional element to your experience. And when we're faced with concerns over our physical health, our mental health can be challenged as well. Our bodies, hearts, and minds are interconnected. This is why addressing health concerns from a holistic perspective in a therapeutic setting can help us heal our bodies.
Counselling can be a powerful adjunct to your naturopathy experience and talking with a registered clinical counsellor can assist you to get to the root of what is challenging your overall wellness. Working with our clinical counsellor Julia, you will explore what your preferences are for your health, life, and relationships, uncover the factors that might contribute to your concerns, like trauma, and start to build a set of tools to help calm your nervous system, balance your mood, and shift negative thought patterns. This is an empowering process that can help you navigate difficult emotions and stressors while building resiliency.
What are some specific counselling tools that will help my body heal?
The nervous system is at the root of many physiological and psychological concerns. When we are dealing with a stressful life situation, our brain and nervous system view this as a threat, and the resulting physiology is a flood of stress hormones, tight muscles, digestion issues, or a "fight or flight" reaction to daily events. Our nervous system is constantly being impacted by what's happening around us, and counselling is all about finding healthy coping mechanisms to manage these stressors.
Here are a few tools that Julia uses to support the nervous system to enter a more calm and resting state, so that her clients are grounded and energized to make the changes they prefer.
Breathing techniques that research has shown to reduce stress hormones and neural activity in the sympathetic nervous system (which deals with threat), and to increase neural activity in the parasympathetic nervous system (which comes online when we feel safe and calm, and helps with digestion, sleep, and muscle relaxation.) Getting coached on these breathing techniques and practicing them daily can have a powerful effect on many nervous system related physical concerns and reduce stress and anxiety, as well as improve sleep, energy levels, and overall feelings of wellness.
Becoming aware of certain thinking patterns that are problematic, such as catastrophizing, ruminating, or "what-iffing." These very common thinking problems can spike worry, anxiety, or sadness and lead to viewing your life through a lens that is negative, which in turn can cause depression. Counselling can help you catch these thinking patterns in action, find ways to dispute them, and then replace them with more balanced, factual, realistic, and fair interpretations of the situation at hand.
Exploring the ways you talk about and understand your identity and story of who you are. Often we can have self-narratives that are negative, critical, or unfair which lead to low self-worth and feelings of powerlessness or despair. Counselling can help you start to explore a more preferred identity, and be on the lookout for examples of when you move closer to the person or life you want to be and build, slowly shifting your self-narrative to one of strength and resilience.
If you are interested in learning more, please reach out for a free Meet & Greet session with Julia to explore how counselling can contribute to achieving wellness and living your best life. You can book a session through the front desk at Oak Integrative by calling (604)227-9990 or at Julia's online booking calendar: https://juliagerlitz.janeapp.com
Here at Oak Integrative, we take an integrated approach to health and well-being, by working collaboratively with our practitioners to support you in the many areas of healthcare. With a Registered Clinical Counsellor, three Naturopathic Doctors, a Chiropractor, Registered Massage Therapists, and a Acupuncturist and Doctor of Chinese Medicine, we can create a tailored health plan suited to your needs.
Oak Integrative is conveniently located near Lougheed Mall and services the surrounding communities of Coquitlam, Burnaby, New Westminster, and Port Moody.
References:
Dossett, M. L., Fricchione, G. L., & Benson, H. (2020). A New Era for Mind-Body Medicine. The New England journal of medicine, 382(15), 1390–1391. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1917461
