- 500 Washington St, Portsmouth, VA 23704
- 757-613-8801
- contact@charesejosie.com
The decision to begin counseling can be scary but also life changing. I am glad you are making your emotional health a priority. One of the biggest challenges in counseling is finding the right counselor that fits your needs. My therapeutic technique is to help you find a deeper understanding of the challenges in your life and assist you in developing an action plan to address these challenges to have the healthy relationships you desire. We will look at behavioral and thought patterns that may be holding you back from living the life you want.
I take a “down to earth” approach with my clients. I know how important it is to feel heard, understood and validated. If you are feeling stuck, unlike yourself and the pressures of life are impacting you, let’s connect for you to gain a sense of control over your life.
Do You Feel Unable To Relax And Slow Down or that your Mind seems to always be going?
Do you feel that you always have one more thing to do before you can feel satisfied? Before you stop to appreciate everything you’ve accomplished, you may have already moved on to the next task. Maybe you feel like there are a million things running through your head at once, from your immediate to-do list to your long-term plans. Even when it seems impossible to do it all, you might push through the exhaustion, certain that you can handle everything if you just try hard enough. Does relaxation seem like a distant dream? Do you wish you could find peace and trust that you’ve done enough?
If you are experiencing anxiety symptoms, such as heightened stress and racing thoughts, you may feel simultaneously worn down and revved up. Perhaps part of you fears that your massive to-do list will never end, while another part fears what will happen if it does. You might long for the present moment, but dread what you’ll find if you do sit quietly with yourself. As you try to manage this ever-present sense of agitation, you might wonder if it’s even possible to feel content and fulfilled.
Most People Experience Some Level Of Anxiety
In our fast-paced, modern society, more people are dealing with anxiety more often and with greater intensity. In the digital age, multi-tasking has become the norm, and it’s increasingly common for people to normalize busyness. As you try to balance all of your responsibilities, along with the internalized pressure to excel, your anxiety may increase. It can cease to be useful and start holding you back from the life you want.
Anxiety Treatment Can Help You Find Relief
Using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques, it’s possible to shift your perspective as worries arise, analyze your thoughts more objectively and realistically and challenge them before they cause distress.
Are You Struggling To Find A Sense Of Meaning And Purpose?
Do you often feel like your mood is low with low motivation and energy in some areas and then you excel in other areas? When other people compliment your character or work, you might feel like an imposter or wonder why you can’t feel connected to your own life. Are you struggling with a deep sense of hopelessness? Do you wish you could find some way to bring true joy and meaning into your life?
If you’re feeling depressed, it may seem as though you’re moving through the world on autopilot. Perhaps your life is very structured but lack any passion for what you do. So, you move forward just to provide and play your part. Even when you smile and crack jokes, you may never feel internal excitement or engagement with the world. Instead, you might feel lost, fearful of what would happen if you didn’t have this structure to keep you moving through the day. And even then, as time goes on, it might be increasingly difficult to see the point.
Many people struggle with depression symptoms. Although these periods might follow distressing events, such as breakups or career transitions, they can also arise for seemingly no reason at all, making it difficult to trust that happiness can last. Like many others, you might blame yourself, as though sadness is evidence of some deep flaw that you can continue to conceal with greater achievements. With support you can find relief from these symptoms, reconnect with your life, and rediscover a sense of hope.
Therapy can also be a safe, nurturing space for you to examine all of the questions you might have about your life and its purpose.
Have you experienced a deeply disturbing experience? You may have been caught unprepared as you received the news, or as you witnessed what happened. Are you struggling to find your way through to the other side? Trauma treatment can help.
You may have experienced trauma very early in your life as well. Developmental trauma can deeply affect the way we experience life events as an adult. When developmental trauma is coupled with a present-day traumatic experience, it can exacerbate your pain.
When we experience trauma, it can affect our entire being – emotionally, physically, mentally, and even spiritually. We may feel ill, frightened, angry, confused, and sad.
Many factors play into how we move through a traumatic experience and how quickly we heal from it. Trauma is experienced differently by different people at various times of life.
If you are needing guidance and help in moving through a trauma – whether it was recent or many years ago – it is important to seek out skilled assistance. Resolving the trauma through trauma treatment as soon as possible will allow you to return to your life feeling stronger and more resilient.
How do I treat trauma?
Using Brainspotting, EMDR, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and talk therapy, we can work together to plan the best course of trauma treatment for your individual needs. We can navigate your current experience together and also resolve any developmental trauma that may be lingering for you.
We have many relationships that are important to us. Those include parent-child, work relationships, intimate relationships and friendships just to name a few. Are you tired of having relationships that do not work out the way you’d like them to? Are you looking for more ease, joy, love, connection, or intimacy? Relationship counseling may help you to find answers you are searching for.
Are you noticing a pattern in your relationships? Are you having a current relationship issue that is impacting your overall mood? Maybe you are naturally drawn to people who really are not a good match for you or maybe things start out pretty well in a relationship, but you decide to sabotage it before it has a chance to really deepen.
What’s going on here? Does it ever make you feel like there must be something wrong with you? Or wrong with everyone else? Or maybe just wrong with the whole world?
Relationship counseling can help to focus on our need for connection. Sometimes our earlier life experiences create challenges that prevent us from developing the kinds of relationships we long for. Sometimes we will think those experiences are not important or we may not even remember. Because we cannot see our own blind spots, we end up repeating our destructive patterns.
I can help you to identify those blind spots. We will look deeply at your present-day relationships and identify how your early life experiences may be showing up in your present-day relationships. We will work through those formative experiences – mentally, physically, and emotionally – freeing you to seek and enjoy healthier, more satisfying relationships.
