Leslie Cochrane, MS, LPC Professional Christian Counseling
Wise Science - Big Heart
Experienced in Anxiety, Depression, Relationship, Grief, Trauma and Adolescent Therapies
Anxiety
The range of anxiety symptoms fall into three categories: Whole Body, Cognitive, and Behavioral. Your body may experience fatigue, sweating, nausea, heart palpitations, or trembling. Cognitively you may have lack of concentration, unreasonable fears, excessive worry, a feeling of impending doom, racing thoughts, or unwanted thoughts. Behavioral symptoms include insomnia, dissociation, hyper vigilance or irritability.
Many times people have problems in life which cause an Adjustment Disorder with Anxiety. A Panic Disorder is characterized by frequent, sudden panic attacks that interfere with daily living. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) creates overwhelming stress, making simple things difficult. Phobias are irrational fears of a situation or object that cause you to avoid life. Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) take your focus off life and puts the focus on fears and threats that may not exist. Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) keeps you out of a social life because of an irrational fear of social situations. Psychotherapy will help you learn to manage your most bothersome symptoms, and learn to reduce all negative symptoms in time.
Depression
Symptoms of depression may include changes in sleep, appetite, energy level, concentration, or changes in daily behavior or self-esteem. The most concerning symptoms of depression are suicidal thoughts, self mutilation, and attempted suicide.
Your depression can be further diagnosed by adding one or more specifiers to fully describe your personal depression. Specifiers include Anxious Distress for unusual worry about possible events. Mixed Features include mania that can display as talking too much and increased energy. Melancholic Features express as feelings of guilt, agitation, sluggishness and changes in appetite or worsened mood in the morning. Atypical Features could include increased appetite, excessive need for sleep, and sensitivity to rejection. Psychotic Features of depression are accompanied by delusions or hallucinations with negative themes. Catatonia is motor activity that involves either uncontrollable and purposeless movement. Peripartum Onset occurs during pregnancy or in weeks or months after delivery.
Therapy for depression includes a customized treatment plan with thought management and behavior modifications to make long term changes over time. Changes are made at your own pace. You can choose to include medications as part of your treatment plan, or you can use an all natural approach.
Relationships
Healthy relationships are essential for a joyful life. When we have problems in a relationship, our life seems out of balance. The cause of relational issues are usually anxiety, depression, stress, mood disorders, addictions, low self-esteem, poor body image, chronic pain, trauma, broken trust, or personality disorders.
In therapy, groups and/or individuals can explore issues in their relationships, work on their communication skills, improve interactions, and resolve conflicts. Therapy will be focused on components of a healthy relationship, boundaries, love languages, cultural awareness, and personal awareness. You will learn interventions that are specifically directed towards the understanding of unhealthy thinking habits and behaviors linked to persistent conflicts. Also, you can identify recurrent patterns of behavior that are present during interactions with others due to past unhealthy relationships.
Grief Therapy
Grief can cause both emotional and physical pain that can impair your ability to function. Symptoms of grief can include feelings of sadness and loneliness, loss of appetite or increased appetite, headaches, physical pains, difficulty with concentration, inability to make decisions, suicidal thoughts, sleeping too much or too little, and irrational thoughts.
The grief counseling will help you to process your emotions in a non-judgmental place at your own pace. Processing through your loss will help you to deal with life's challenges when you are ready. Compounded grief can occur when you experience more than one loss before you have processed the first one. Complicated Grief is a condition where you just can not accept the loss. Symptoms include troubling thoughts, difficulty regulating emotions, or dysfunctional behaviors making it a much longer time frame before you can adapt to life without your loved one. Grief counseling can help you to process a loss no matter how long ago it occurred.
Trauma
Trauma can occur at any age, and can even come from second-hand exposure to tragic events. Men and women can experience trauma as a consequence of their job, especially military personnel, first responders, law enforcement, and health care professionals. Repeated abuse and neglect can be a source of trauma also. Everyone who experiences a trauma has different reactions to it. Symptoms can include but are not limited to the following: nightmares, spacing out, nervousness, hyper- vigilance, anger issues, sleep disorders, muscle aches, depression, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating.
Counseling will help you deal with the emotional and physical responses caused by a trauma. Therapy will be customized and sensitive to each individual's needs. Processing through a traumatic event in therapy may be needed to create healing, but may not be necessary for some people. The goal of therapy is to reduce negative symptoms, and to help you move forward with your life.
Adolescent Therapy
Psychotherapy helps adolescents by providing emotional support, and by teaching skills to resolve conflicts, manage feelings, control urges, and solve problems. Relationship is key to working with adolescents. While privacy and confidentiality are essential, psychotherapists are mandated reporters for minors, meaning they are required to report child abuse and neglect of any kind. They are also required to report if a client is actively suicidal or plans to hurt someone else.
Therapy is individualized according to the needs of the adolescent. If there is a significant disruption of life due to an emotional disorder, then your therapist may work with other medical professionals to provide the best therapy. The parent's part is recognizing that their child needs therapy and support from someone other than the parent. This need of the child does not indicate that the parent has somehow “failed” their child. At times, family therapy sessions may be needed to assist the family with adjusting to changes in the adolescent.