Psychological Services

Dr. Johnson offers psychotherapy and counseling services to individuals, couples and families.

Individual Psychotherapy

Dr. Johnson provides individual counseling and psychotherapy services for people who experience:

Depression
Anxiety (including OCD and panic disorder)
Trauma (including sexual abuse)
Mood disorders
Relationship difficulties
Loneliness
Executive functioning (ADHD/ADD)
New parenthood, parenting and caregiving
Losses such as illness, job, financial, community and greif
Career change

Psychotherapy can help to:

Give you hope for the future
Change old patterns of behavior and relate to others
Heal trauma
Bring more satisfying relationships and happier times into your life
Improve your sense of direction and motivation in life
Improve and stabilize mood
Improve sleep

Couples Counseling

Couples Counseling can help to:

Reduce conflict and negativity between the couple
Increase communication and understanding
Increase intimacy, passion and sexual attraction
Help to clarify when a relationship needs to end

Couples seek therapy to increase their feelings of intimacy and connection, both emotional and romantic, and at times to figure out if they should stay together. Couples often come into therapy because of conflict characterized by the same issues that emerge again and again leading to a combination of deep pain and hurt feelings that often builds up over time. These painful feelings frequently occur within a context of love, attachment and shared community that once and may continue to bond the couple together.

My role as a couple’s therapist is to help each member of the couple to clarify their own feelings and help them to really hear what it is their partner is saying, and in this way to build shared understanding and to increase communication. I use the Imago active listening technique to help the couple to communicate. I find the technique effective because it helps to connect the couple using eye contact and physical closeness, and because the it clarifies what isn’t being heard when the partner is speaking as well as one's own response to one's partner's words. I also use Terry Real's relational life therapy techniques to assist each member in the couple to better understand their own relationship and interactive style. We work together to clarify and discuss what the issues are, and creatively develop ways to resolve them.

COUPLES COUNCELING

Anxiety

Anxiety symptoms can include:

Restlessness and muscle tension
Foreboding of future events
Wakefulness at night, trouble falling asleep
Panic which can include racing heartbeat, having trouble breathing, sweating
Fear of dying

The feeling of anxiety is often felt very powerfully in the body; it can feel impossible to change the channel. Anxiety often wakes us up at night or makes it hard for us to fall asleep. A certain amount of stress is normal. It can help to motivate us to prepare for future events by narrowing our attention, and provide adrenaline to help us to meet the challenge. But when we overreact internally to life events our oldest and deepest reptilian brain structures take over, people and situations maybe reacted to as if they are dangerous threats, your appraisal of them can often be off and inaccurate. Sometimes panic can ensue and you might find yourself in a fight, flight or freeze state. In a freeze state you might be speechless, blanking on information, like names, that you knew well, you might struggle to speak, or you may experience a restlessness and desire to flee the situation. In a fight state, you may become highly irritable and aggressive.

Anxiety may include making unrealistic predictions of future events that will go badly, known as catastrophizing, it’s all going to go wrong and be terrible, they’ll discover that I am a failure. Anxiety you can result in not feeling fully in your body, or feeling quite out of control. Therapy in a trusting and supportive environment can help to reduce feelings of overwhelming anxiety that can lead to panic, phobias and an overly active adrenal system. Therapy can bring relief and healing to help you meet the challenges in life without becoming overwhelmed by them.

Anxiety

Depression

Depression symptoms can include:

A feeling of sadness and loneliness
Lack of enjoyment and engagement in activities that you previously enjoyed
Negative comparisons to others
Low energy, a heaviness that comes over the body, trouble concentrating
A loss of confidence, and a growing feeling of hopelessness that can become pervasive
Reviewing past events again and again, having trouble living in the present
Changes in appetite or sleeping patterns

Depression is different from sadness which is a normal reaction to feeling alone, loss, disappointment, and grief. Sadness becomes depression when we feel that way more frequently than not, for protracted periods of time. You are feeling depressed when you feel tearful and the usual things that you normally do to feel better no longer work. When one is depressed, normal tasks can feel hard to do, heaviness often comes over the body, and normal appetites and sleep often change. These feelings tend to lead to behaviors including withdrawing from social interactions, interpreting communications with others in a negative light, and further isolating behavior, leading to more feelings of depression. A downward feedback loop then evolves which increases sad feelings and isolation, and then depression can become harder and harder to climb out of once you start slipping downwards.

Psychotherapy can help stop this downward slide into darkness. Talk therapy can help to identify both the past and present causes of your interior pain and sadness, some of which may be inherited through nature (genes). Once these causes are identified, each can be addressed with insight and understanding of yourself, learning how to be gentle and care for yourself and be your best advocate, and through challenging negative beliefs about one self and behavioral change.

Mood Disorders

Mood disorders are a group of mental health conditions characterized by significant changes in a person's mood or emotional state. Common mood disorders include bipolar disorder, cyclothymia, major depressive disorder and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. These conditions can have a significant impact on a person's daily life, relationships, and overall wellbeing.

Psychotherapy can help individuals with mood disorders in a number of ways. It can provide a safe and supportive environment to explore and process difficult emotions and experiences, and thereby bring relief to intense and difficult emotions. Psychotherapy can also provide education about the mood disorder helping you to understand the origins of the experience. It can also provide coping skills and strategies to best stabilize and mange mood. In some cases psychotherapy may be used in combination with medication or other treatments to effectively manage mood disorders.

Mood Disorders

Trauma

Trauma refers to a one-time experience or series of ongoing experiences which have affected us deeply in a negative way. Trauma leaves a lasting imprint that is hard to escape; being sexually abused as a child is a common trauma, as is childhood emotional abuse. Other traumas include transportation accidents, experiencing, witnessing or hearing about human atrocities, including rape, violence, terrible human deprivation or suffering, being in a war, and natural disasters. The effects of trauma can be vicarious, that is not directly experienced but seen or heard about. Trauma can also be passed down through generations (intergenerational transmitted trauma). Other forms of ongoing trauma can be due to being a member of a marginalized or out-of-power racial/ethnic group or having a non-normative sexual identity.

Traumatic injury can manifest as rage, withdrawal, alcoholism or drug use to attempt to suppress interior pain and negative self-evaluation. The injury can also present as flashbacks or shutting down, and a limited repertoire of emotional responses to people and situations.

Trauma healing often involves both talk therapy as well as somatic methods that work to treat how the trauma is held in the body. Some types of trauma therapy I practice include Somatic Experiencing, and Heart-Assisted Therapy.

Trauma

ADHD

ADHD/Executive Functioning

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) commonly know as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects an individual's ability to sustain attention, control impulses and regulate emotions. Psychotherapy can help individuals with ADHD / ADD:

Develop strategies to manage symptoms including impulse control and regulating emotions
Improve executive functioning
Reduce the impact of ADHD on daily life by developing routines and a lifestyle that suits your strengths
Improve overall functioning and promote overall well-being and quality of life
Provide additional education and resources