Therapy Services

Anxiety is one of the most common reasons people come to therapy. Everyone worries. When worries stop us from doing what we love or get in the way of connecting with people, it may be useful to do something about it. What are you anxious about? Dogs? Rejection? Flying? Failure? Public Speaking? Whatever it is, there is an excellent reason for it.

Anxiety is the alarm system that tells us we’re getting too close to danger. Like a smoke detector, though, it can’t always tell when there’s a fire. Our internal smoke detector may be going off because of an actual fire or because I left my pizza in the oven just a bit too long. Therapy will help reset the smoke detector so that we can tell the difference between a true alarm for danger and a false alarm.

We want to be able to feel afraid when there is danger – so we can act to stay safe! And we want to not feel overly worried most of the day – when everything is okay. We reset the smoke detector by taking the time to learn why we are anxious. Anxiety is the weed, but the root of our anxiety is something under the surface we can’t see. Once we know the root, we can take control.

Depression is another widespread reason for people to come to therapy. Feeling sad or mourning a big loss is healthy. But depression is more complicated than that. Depression gets in the way of our ability to feel positive emotions and do the important things in our lives.

Depression is like if we turned off the water in a house, so now no water comes through any of the pipes. Now, we don’t feel sad, but we also don’t feel joy… or anything else. That’s the numb and disconnected feeling that comes with depression. We turned off the water for a good reason. We felt awful about ourselves and our world. These painful emotions felt too overwhelming to deal with. But, if the water stays turned off, we won’t be able to live a life that feels good and meaningful to us.

To help, we need to turn the water back on very slowly. That means slowly reintroducing emotions to practice using them to help with challenges (instead of pushing them away). Eventually, we will build up to the bigger, more painful emotions that caused us to shut off the water in the first place. 

Most people have a tricky relationship with body image and food. Sometimes we over-control our eating. Sometimes we under-control our eating. No matter our eating patterns, our relationship with food is a clue about how we are doing for the rest of our lives.

When we feel out of control, we look for ways to control our world. When we don’t have the power to change the things we want directly, we might focus on something else. Sometimes we do that with food. It’s normal to have felt out of control in these situations starting at a young age. All of this can be affected by what our family, friends, and the world says about our appearance.

That’s why the root of our eating patterns is related to how we feel about ourselves and the world around us. We control what we can to protect ourselves from feeling out of control. That helps to solve the problem in the short-term but may impact our health in the long-term. In therapy, we will slowly help you build pride and confidence in your ability to cope with feeling out of control in new ways. From there, you will be better able to develop a healthy relationship with your emotions and body. 

The Singh Psychology lion represents pride in two main ways: (1) the pride we feel in ourselves and (2) the pride we feel about our community. Ultimately, building pride is what Singh Psychology is all about.

Starting at a very young age, we hear messages from family, friends, and society about who we should be. It’s normal for shame or confusion to creep in. This may be especially true when we have been told negative things about ourselves or a group we are a part of. This may also come up when we hold identities that seem at odds with one another. Here, we untangle who you are from who you are “supposed to be” so that you can decide what being you is all about. 

You will learn to understand yourself, your values, and all of the diverse identities that go into making you, you. You will learn to validate yourself and feel proud of who you are. No matter what identity you explore (gender, race, religion, sexuality, etc.), you will leave Singh Psychology with pride. 

Feeling out of control can be overwhelming. This is especially true when we feel out of control of our thoughts. When thoughts pop into our minds repeatedly, against our will, these are called “obsessions.” We have developed many strategies to increase our sense of control and escape that overwhelmed feeling.

Some of those strategies are very effective in the short term but start to cause us problems in the long term. For instance, we might believe that we must do things to control the situation even when they are not connected to the problem (like doing things a certain number of times to ensure success). It may also start to cause problems when we overcorrect and do so much to solve the problem that we make more problems (like checking that we have locked the door so many times we are late to where we are trying to go). These behaviors are called “compulsions.”

In the short term, engaging in these compulsions fixes the problem! It can get rid of the intense anxiety we are feeling! Unfortunately, it doesn’t get to the root of the issue. To do that, we must learn what we protect ourselves from and why. We usually find that there are big feelings we’re avoiding because we feel out of control when we feel them. In therapy, we’ll safely practice feeling those emotions so that they can feel more like a strength than a threat. 

When we talk about “substances,” we are talking about anything we put into our bodies that impacts our state of mind, such as alcohol, marijuana, nicotine, or even food. We may find that we want to change how much or how often we use substances when we feel out of control or start to have problems because of our use. This might also happen with activities such as shopping, video games, or pornography use. Our approach to these challenges is to promote a healthy relationship with these substances or behaviors. We want them to add to your life, not be something you “need.”

Substances can become something we rely on very easily. That’s because they fill up our brains in an enjoyable way. When we do that often, our brain doesn’t work as hard to give us those natural good feelings. That’s when we start to rely on it. We now need it to fill us up like our brains used to fill us with those good feelings. This is especially true when we’re stressed, anxious, or down.

In therapy, we’ll help you recognize that pattern and break it. Over time, we will teach your brain to restart the production of natural good feelings. Whether you want to reduce or stop your use, getting your brain back on track will move you toward your goal. 

Trauma can overwhelm us. We’re unable to understand, process, or cope with what happened to us. Whether that is a car crash, emotional abuse, physical abuse, assault, sexual assault, or medical trauma. Trauma forces us to protect ourselves to an extreme level.

You'd be terrified if you were walking in a jungle and a tiger jumped out at you. After that experience, you would look for anything else that might be dangerous. A twig snapping or leaves rustling would now cause you to think of that tiger and cause you to feel panic. That’s your body trying to keep you safe. This attention to danger may help you to avoid tigers in the future, but it might also cause you to feel on edge even when you’re well out of the jungle and back in your normal life. You might avoid walking in your neighborhood or keep away from anything orange and black to feel safe. Your body is trying to keep you safe, but you are starting to miss out on things that you might want to do.

When our safety has been compromised (usually by another person), people and relationships start to feel dangerous. Trauma therapy starts with developing a safe, trusting relationship with the therapist. Once we feel safe, we begin to slowly explore what has made us feel so unsafe in the past. We will build your confidence and skills to approach these terrifying experiences and emotions slowly. We can fully process them so that you can reconnect with yourself and others.