Time and space to benefit from support to address personal needs and achieve well-being in mind, body, soul and spirit is paramount to living well and feeling good. Stress is a healthy response to internal or external pressure. Pressure can create anxiety and fear or excitement and positive anticipation. Benefits are significant and far-reaching for men and women in learning better ways to deal with both everyday and extreme stresses.

Everyday stress:
Sometimes all people need is a brief opportunity to regain perspective or sort through a specific concern. Other times, it is essential to have peace of mind in knowing long-term support is available. This may occur when several issues are at hand or there is a desire for deeper self-knowledge and skills in order to create more substantial and meaningful change.

Relationships, family matters and parenting are common sources of stress. Other typical motivations for pursuing personal development are a desire for greater confidence, self-esteem, living in accord with personal values and coming to self-acceptance. Assertiveness training and healthy anger expression are often skills people wish to improve. The desire for better sexual relating is also part of the many everyday stresses that encourage people to seek caring guidance to achieve practical outcomes.

Sometimes people are aware specifically of what they would like to improve or change in their lives. Other times it may be feeling 'out of sorts' or awareness of being bothered by worry, apathy, anxiety, depression, irritability, feeling 'flat', avoiding things, trouble sleeping, eating or with sex which prompts seeking assistance to make things different. Often, it's just a sense that it's time to focus on personal growth.

Extreme stress:
Major life transitions, reaching a crossroad as well as traumatic experiences or abuse (emotional, physical, sexual or sadistic) create a more severe sense of distress, uncertainty or disruption to quality, and enjoyment, of life. Many people, at some point, experience grief and loss that can be overwhelming. The reliability of experienced, compassionate and ethical support to navigate troubled waters, at a safe pace, is necessary to begin to rebuild what has been shaken.

As a result of extreme stress, it is not uncommon for people to experience varying degrees of anxiety, depression, sleeping problems, eating difficulties, fears, unexplained physical sensations or discomfort, memory difficulties etc. They may also have experiences that they, or others, believe are strange such as spacing-out and seeing or hearing uncomfortable things etc. Sometimes people question their sanity and fear that no-one can, or would want to, help them. These experiences are normal indications of feeling overwhelmed or struggling to cope.

Sessions provide ways of understanding and using practical strategies to respect these experiences to sort through the underlying conflicts in order to create change.

It is important to find professionals who understand the consequences of extreme stress. They know how to work with people's inherent resilience and ability to heal from extreme challenges, deep pain and sorrow, and to transform these experiences in order to live well.