Anxiety is perhaps the most common reason that individuals enter counselling therapy. Anxiety is a syndrome which includes physical sensations, cognitive patterns, and powerful emotions, and for some people can lead to experiences of panic. Counselling can help with learning how to manage these symptoms as well as healing root causes.

Relationship distress, or just the desire for improvement, comes in many forms. Couples counselling creates a profound space for intimate connection between partners. Decades of research has revealed that these deep conversations can repair conflict and have a lasting change on the quality of intimacy, commitment, and sex.

If you have been considered counselling therapy for your struggles, but have wondered about the gender gap, you aren’t wrong. Four out of five Counsellors are women, and the ratio of female clients is about the same. It’s not unreasonable to wonder if men are welcome in counselling spaces, and if typical approaches (which might be informed by female driven case studies) have good outcomes for men. At Nightingale, we are committed to ensuring gender equities in our approach, and recognize that men’s experiences with Counselling, as well as the issues they bring to counselling, deserve specific treatment.

Millions of Canadians are currently, or at risk, of experiencing depression and the pandemic has not helped. Counselling provides evidence-backed support and opportunities for healing for everyone with depression: from those who are wondering if they might be experiencing depression, to folks with diagnoses and medicinal strategies in place.

Disordered eating at its root is a complex and interwoven set of motivating causes and compulsive strategies and behaviours. It is tempting to wonder “What is wrong with the person?”, but the complexity of these disorders tells a different story. Talk therapy for disordered eating must go beyond merely looking at individual psychology and behaviour. Instead, there must be a three-way focus on the biological and physiological aspects, the psychological aspects, as well as the sociocultural influences, each of which play roles in both the development and sustenance of disordered eating.

While the role of biomedical intervention is necessary, it is often insufficient. For example, no other discipline can replace the need for effective diagnosis and medical intervention on the primary symptom of epilepsy: seizures. But we are mistaken when we believe that that primary symptom captures the entire illness: instead, what the research tells us, and everyone with epilepsy knows, is that there are a host of secondary symptoms, problems, and distressing realities in addition to the seizures themselves.