Common Reasons for Counselling
Therapy is available for any reason, any time. Whether something is weighing on you—whether it's on this list or something completely different—you deserve support. Whether you came with clarity about the issue or just know something feels off, therapy provides a space to explore what's actually happening and what it means for your life.
People come to therapy for big, obvious things and for simple stuff that's become heavy. For decisions they can't make alone. For feelings they don't know how to name. For patterns they're tired of. All of it is valid. All of it matters.
Browse the issues below, or get in touch → to talk through what's weighing on you.
Loss of a person, an identity, a dream, a relationship you thought would last. Grief feels like this:
Imagine your life as a box and your grief as a ball inside it. There's a pain button on the side of the box.
Right after a major loss, the grief ball is huge—nearly filling the entire box. Every small movement of daily life causes the ball to slam against the pain button constantly. The pain feels relentless, random, unavoidable. You can't get through a day without being hit by it.
But grief doesn't disappear. It doesn't shrink and vanish. Instead, your life expands around it. The box gets bigger. Your world grows. The grief ball stays exactly the same size—it's still there, still real—but now it moves around inside a much larger space. Some days it bounces about and never touches the pain button. Allowing you to remember without pain.
Then something unexpected—a song, a date on the calendar, a smell, a random memory—shakes the box just right. The ball slams the pain button. And it hurts. Just as much as it did in those early days. You might think, I thought I'd moved past this. But that's not how grief works. When the trigger hits, the pain is real because the loss is still real.
Healing doesn't mean forgetting or "getting over it." It means your life becomes large enough that grief isn't constantly pressing on the pain button. The grief remains part of you—but it changes from something that dominates everything to something you live alongside.
Therapy provides space to understand this process without judgment, to work through the loss, and to discover who you are after it—not instead of the grief, but alongside it.
Constant "what-ifs" that won't shut up, panic attacks that feel like you're dying, social dread that isolates you, catastrophizing that makes every decision feel dangerous. Anxiety is exhausting and it hijacks everything—relationships, work, sleep, decision-making.
Why "just relax" doesn't work: Anxiety isn't a problem to eliminate—some anxiety is necessary and useful. The problem is when it's running your life, dictating your choices, stealing your peace. Your nervous system learned to be vigilant, to detect threats, to protect you from danger. That protection made sense once. The question is whether it still does.
How we work with it: We get specific about what your anxiety is actually protecting you from. What threat was it designed to detect? What past experience taught your nervous system to be this vigilant? Once you understand the intention behind the anxiety, you get to decide: is this still necessary? What would it look like to trust yourself instead?
Depression is different for every person, and it's not a character flaw. It's a state where motivation evaporates, where getting out of bed feels impossible, where the world has lost its color. The work here isn't to make you artificially cheerful—it's to help you understand what depression is communicating while rebuilding the tiniest glimmers of momentum.
What depression is telling you: Depression itself is information. It might be signaling overwhelm, loss, burnout, disconnection, or that something fundamental in your life isn't working. Rather than fighting the depression, we get specific about what it's saying. That clarity changes everything.
Why motivation collapses: Depression doesn't just feel bad—it destroys your capacity for action. The goals that once mattered feel impossible. But here's the thing: we don't start with grand goals. We start with what's the smallest possible thing you can actually do right now. Not to inspire you, but because tiny actions rebuild agency and momentum. A 5-minute walk. Texting one person. Drinking a glass of water. These micro-actions matter because they prove you're not paralyzed—you're just moving smaller.
The pattern underneath: Depression often connects to deeper patterns—unmet needs, betrayed expectations, exhaustion from pretending. In sessions, we trace what led here. We work with the emotion itself and build tiny, achievable actions that restore your sense of choice.
Trauma is an encounter with the dark side—sometimes of humanity, sometimes of yourself. It's a single incident or ongoing experiences that have left you feeling unsafe, hypervigilant, emotionally flooded. It's seeing that evil exists, that suffering is real, that the world is less safe than you thought. Or it's discovering that you're capable of things you didn't know you could do, think, or survive.
Why trauma rewires everything: A traumatic experience doesn't just happen and pass. It changes how you see the world, how you trust people, how you understand what's good and what's evil. Your nervous system learns that danger is everywhere. Your sense of self fractures. You lose ground in who you are and what's possible.
The real work: Rather than avoiding the darkness, we look at it directly—not to retraumatize, but to integrate. We examine what you learned about humanity, about yourself, about your capacity for survival or harm. We rebuild your moral understanding: recognizing that humans are capable of profound cruelty and profound compassion. That what happened to you forever changes you—and you can choose what that means now. This isn't about forgiveness or closure; it's about reclaiming agency in the face of something that tried to take it. The work is slow, grounded, and deeply relational because trauma is about disconnection—and healing happens in genuine human connection.
Work drives enormous amounts of adult life. When it's broken, everything breaks. Burnout isn't laziness or weakness—it's the result of sustained misalignment: between your values and your reality, between what you have to give and what's being asked, between who you are and who you're pretending to be.
What's actually happening: Work stress often isn't about the work itself. It's about autonomy (no control over your decisions), values conflict (doing things that don't align with who you are), or relational failure (feeling unsupported or undervalued). We trace what's actually draining you.
The pattern underneath: Many people bring patterns from earlier life to work—perfectionism, people-pleasing, the need to prove yourself, fear of failure. These patterns got you somewhere once. Now they're killing you. Counselling helps you understand these patterns, set boundaries, make decisions aligned with your values, and rebuild resilience.
Partnerships, family, friendships, even work relationships—when they're broken or painful, it affects everything. Much of who we are gets formed in relationship. How we attach, trust, communicate, handle conflict—these patterns come from early relational experiences. Current relationship pain often echoes earlier relational wounds.
What we work on: How you show up in relationships. Your attachment patterns. Where you go numb or reactive. How past relationships shape current ones. And crucially: how to communicate what you actually need while staying genuinely connected to the other person. Relationships are where real growth happens—if you have support for it.
Career changes, coming out, becoming a parent or caregiver, retirement, diagnosis, aging, the slow realization that your life doesn't match the plan. These are major identity shifts—your sense of self becomes unstable. You lose the familiar scaffolding of who you were. The new identity hasn't solidified yet. You're in the gap, uncertain who you're becoming.
Often people feel like they're failing when actually they're in the necessary discomfort of transformation. We explore what you're grieving about the old identity, what you're building in the new one, and what's being asked of you in the transition.
Sex and desire are profoundly connected to relationship, safety, trauma history, body image, and how you experience yourself as worthy of pleasure. Sexual difficulties (low desire, erectile challenges, anorgasmia, painful intercourse) are rarely just physical.
What's really happening: Sexual issues are often rooted in past trauma (body learns not to feel), relational disconnection (desire dies when the relationship feels unsafe), performance anxiety, shame about your body or sexuality, or disconnection from your own desire.
How we work with it: With sensitivity and directness. We explore what sex and desire mean to you, where shame lives, how past experiences affect current capacity. We look at what your body is communicating when it "won't cooperate." The work is often about rebuilding safety, reconnecting to your own desire, and separating past trauma from present relatedness.
"Am I good enough?" This question shows up as perfectionism, imposter syndrome, chronic self-doubt, struggling to assert yourself, feeling invisible. Usually, these connect to early relational experiences. How were you valued as a child? Did you learn to disappear to keep peace? Were you compared unfavorably to others?
The internal critic: Many people live with an internal voice that sounds remarkably like a parent or authority figure from their past. That voice says you're not enough, you don't deserve good things, you have to prove yourself constantly. The work involves noticing that voice, understanding where it came from, and building a new internal dialogue based on actual evidence of who you are.
ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other neurological differences aren't problems to fix—they're how your brain works. But you live in a world designed for neurotypical minds, so the constant friction creates real distress: shame about "underperforming," anxiety about being "different," exhaustion from masking.
The work: Stop fighting your neurology and start working with it. Understand how your particular brain works, where you have natural strengths and genuine challenges. Build a life that respects how you actually think. This often involves grieving time lost to shame and rebuilding your relationship with your neurodivergent self.