“Ask for help. Not because you are weak. But because you want to remain strong.” ~ Les Brown
Our licensed professionals are available to help with individual counseling in the following areas (and more):
Daily life has countless stressors, challenges, and triggers that you endure. Over time this can take a toll on mental health.
Do you ever think:
There are also those who are living with complex psychological issues like trauma or grief, or mental illnesses whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, that have additional needs to be addressed.
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Counseling can have benefits for everyone, from those who are dealing with longstanding trauma to those who are simply burnt out from hustle culture. There are many different types of counseling that can help you work through every potential hardship, and they can do it with professional efficiency and perfect confidentiality. Below are some of the counseling options that Pathways offers, and how they are used most effectively.
Anger and learning how to manage your anger is a reason for you to seek help. You aren’t sure why you react so strongly to some situations, and neither do those around you.
By working with a trained counselor to identify the core reasons for the anger, you are able to learn how to make changes.
You can find ways to cope and manage your reactions, rather than have them control your responses.
When you learn long term skills, you no longer need to worry about how others around you respond to your outbursts. Your interactions become more interactive and less defensive.
As you learn and change, your world becomes a more pleasurable place to be and thrive! You become calmer and more engaging with those around you.
Is anger management is putting you into a compromising situation, and you want to change it? You can work with your counselor to learn immediate anger response techniques. You can develop responses to triggers and and develop ways to deal with them.
You are not alone dealing with anger. Find the ways to lessen the impact of anger and increase your positive reactions.
Dealing with anxiety and stress is major reason people seek counseling.
Letting the burden of stress weigh you down for too long can lead to suffering damage to both your mental health and your physical health.
This daily stress can have an unimaginable impact on kids and can lead to anxiety in children.
Without healthy ways to cope with this anxiety and stress, children can suffer developmental and social challenges that can follow them for the rest of their lives.
Working with an experienced therapist can give them the emotional toolkit they need to be more adaptive and resilient.
By working with a professional therapist, adults and children experiencing stress or anxiety can learn how to engage and process those feelings in a healthy and productive way.
Without the proper skills to manage these emotions, children, teens, and adults are all at risk for developing potentially problematic behaviors, including:
Depression counseling is another incredibly common reason why people seek professional help maintaining optimal mental health.
Everyone has a bad day now and then, but depression is more than just a temporary bad mood or case of the blues, it can last for significant amounts of time.
Sometimes stretching for weeks or even months at a time.
If you, or someone you’re close to, has been displaying signs of depression, getting individual counseling can be the key to a bright future.
Common treatments for depression include:
Many different forms of treatment can drastically reduce the severity, length, and frequency of major depressive episodes.
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Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, known as EMDR, is a new approach to treating trauma that has been extensively researched and shown to be highly effective.
Our Scottsdale individual counselors are highly trained in this specialized form of mental health treatment.
The range of potential traumas that eye movement desensitization and reprocessing can be used to treat is significant and can encompass anything that the individual personally feels is traumatic.
It has been used to treat everything from grief over the loss of a job, to the end of marriage in divorce.
Individuals can use eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help them cope with traumatic or stressful medical diagnoses or vehicle accidents.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing can even be used to help reduce the trauma symptoms associated with exposure to war, genocide, and rape.
The primary mechanism behind eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is that it allows the individual to access their traumatic memories on their own terms. This permits them to be processed and resolved on an emotional level first, then on a cognitive level, which can help the individual work through the trauma and resolve it almost entirely.
The biggest factor in being able to use eye movement desensitization and reprocessing successfully is being able to access and subsequently process the trauma in a safe and controlled environment.
When the traumatic memories are accessed in an environment of safety, it allows more adaptive pathways are formed.
This can significantly reduce behaviors or thought patterns that were previously considered problematic.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, DBT, is a way of helping people to live a more positive, carefree life.
DBT creates healthy coping strategies for stress and emotional regulation challenges and has a secondary goal of improving your relationships with those around you.
Initially developed to treat borderline personality disorder, DBT has been used to treat a wide variety of emotional regulation disorders, interpersonal effectiveness issues, and even distress tolerance.
For self-destructive behaviors like disordered eating or substance use disorders, DBT is highly beneficial.
It has also been used to great effect on anxiety, depression, and attention deficit disorders.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is what’s known as “problem-focused” therapy. It is designed to help you explore the links between your behavior and the thoughts and emotions that cause it.
The overall goal of CBT treatment is to gain a more thorough understanding of problematic thoughts and behaviors by being able to consciously identify and stop them.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is known for being a very hands-on and practical technique for managing internal problem-solving.
It focuses on the cognitive processes that eventually lead to the feelings and emotions that guide your behavior.
This helps better equip you to manage your mental health in a more active and participatory way.
Trauma is an incredibly complex and challenging thing to deal with alone, but luckily professionals like the counselors at Pathways are well-equipped to handle your trauma counseling needs.
They can help you learn healthy and effective ways to deal with the flood of feelings and emotions that trauma can create. This type of therapy can significantly lessen the potential for developing PTSD.
Surviving a traumatic event, or merely witnessing something traumatic can lead to lasting effects in even the mentally-strongest people.
Allowing trauma to fester and worsen can lead to feelings of numbness, paranoia, and symptoms like flashbacks and nightmares.
Mindfulness is a very effective component of many successful treatment plans, but it’s also one that is frequently forgotten or neglected.
Mindfulness is the practice of keeping an active, conscious awareness of your feelings, thoughts, and body functions in the context of the present moment.
Another tenet of mindfulness is reducing or eliminating the judgment of your own thoughts or feelings as either “wrong” or “right.” This freedom allows you to just feel what you need to feel at that particular moment.
Mindfulness can include meditation or breathing exercises and can help an individual to focus their attention on what is most important at the moment.
Often times we get too hung up in what could have been or what could be.
With mindfulness therapy, you’ll learn to stay grounded and think in a more practical way.
A very significant reason that people participate in individual counseling is for grief.
Grief is one of the most challenging emotions to deal with, and it can be caused by a wide variety of triggers.
There are more than three dozen common life experiences that can create feelings of grief in a person, from breakups and divorce to medical diagnoses, the death of a loved one, and even the loss of trust or losing a job can create deep feelings of grief.
One of the keys to dealing with grief is to understand it and work through the feelings and thoughts that come with it.
Grief if complex though, and having the help of a professional can help you process the emotions in a safer and more effective way.
We never forget those we have lost. We simply adapt to our new reality. Sometimes this new journey is just easier to navigate with a mental health advocate by your side.
Bipolar disorder is a mental health disorder that is characterized by “cycling” between extended depressive episodes, and periods of mania or relative normality.
They also may have times of a hypomania state, which is elevated, but not full blown. In this state they may feel upbeat and more productive. They might also show symptoms like decreased sleep patterns, recklessness or be more impulsive.
Bipolar I and Bipolar II are both serious mental health diagnoses, and without professional treatment, they can have significant negative effects on daily life.
Bipolar disorder can lead to problematic and impulsive behavior, as well as severe depressive episodes that can lead to self-harm or suicidal ideation.
People with bipolar disorder often feel helpless and at the mercy of their condition, but with professional help, the symptoms can be minimized and managed.
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Those living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), can have considerable difficulty leading relatively normal daily lives, due to the demands of their compulsions.
These compulsions can range from compulsive eating to repetitive behaviors. OCD behaviors can include hoarding, obsessions lacking visible compulsions, harm obsessions, and more.
OCD counseling can help individuals living with compulsions to learn different methods of coping with them and healthier ways of managing them on a daily basis.
Many people with OCD are aware that they are neurodivergent, but many don’t realize there is an issue. And those that are aware of their OCD are often confused or lost as to how to stop their behaviors, even when it becomes detrimental to their lives.
PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder, and it is a mental health disorder that is becoming incredibly common among adults in the US.
It is most well-known as being a disorder common to combat veterans, but it can develop in anyone that has been part of or even witnessed a particularly traumatic event.
PTSD counseling can help with those living with the disorder to reduce the occurrence and severity of the symptoms. This can mean few nightmares, lower levels of anxiety, reduced flashbacks, and more manageable thought patterns.
A great way to enhance the impact of individual treatment can be participation in group therapy sessions.
Group therapy offers individuals with similar treatment goals to participate in a more open and social treatment type.
Group counseling is able to help individuals feel less isolated in their treatment, and can increase their support network with peers that are living with similar struggles.
This type of counseling is always conducted in a safe space designed for open and confidential sharing.
The members all agree to keep group session content confidential and only to identify with other group members in the group, so as not to inadvertently “out” someone. Group counseling is often used for people with very similar struggles, like going through a divorce, or dealing with intense grief.
One of the most helpful aspects of group counseling is hearing how other members are dealing with and growing through their struggles. This is another way that group counseling can augment individual counseling because it can give the individual a crucial point of reference for changes they want to see in themselves.
If you or someone you know has been struggling with mental health or emotional issues, the most important thing to remember is that there is no shame in asking for help.
The professional therapists at Pathways Counseling have years of education and experience they can use to help you understand your own thoughts and emotions. We’re rained to help you understand the most effective ways to navigate your daily life.
For more information about how professional counseling can help you, reach out today to discuss your needs in a confidential environment. And, when you’re ready you can book an appointment to begin your journey to better mental health.