Another Chapter Counselling

For a lot of people, rest doesn't feel restful. It feels like something to justify. 🎯

The guilt that shows up during rest often has nothing to do with laziness. It usually comes from a long-standing belief that your worth is tied to output, and that stopping means falling behind.

Rest that comes with guilt still counts as rest, but untangling that guilt is often where the real work happens.

What's your relationship with rest like? Tell us in the comments.

One small thing goes wrong, and suddenly it feels like everything is wrong.

That's emotional flooding. It happens when your nervous system gets overwhelmed past its capacity and stops being able to sort a small stressor from a big one. In that state, a spilled coffee and a genuine crisis can feel identical in your body.

It's not an overreaction. It's a nervous system that's already near its limit before the small thing even happens.

Understanding this changes how you respond to yourself in those moments, and it's often the first step toward feeling less at the mercy of them.

If this sounds familiar, I'd love to help you understand what's happening and find your way back to steadier ground.

Free 15-minute consultation at anotherchapter.ca.

Sometimes the fastest way to calm down starts with your eyes, not your thoughts.

Orienting is a simple somatic tool where you slowly look around the room, letting your eyes take in real details in your environment. It signals to your nervous system that the present moment is safe, which is often more convincing to your body than any reassuring thought.

Try it right now and tell us how it felt.

Numbing out wasn't weakness. It was a skill that got you through something. ✨

Shutting down emotionally when things felt like too much wasn't a failure of character. It was your nervous system finding a way to survive an experience that had no other exit available at the time.

The skill that protected you then doesn't have to be the only tool you have now.

Reach out if you'd like support finding ways to cope.

Sometimes the hardest part isn't the event itself. It's the days leading up to it. 🎯

Anticipatory anxiety is the dread that builds before something happens, whether it's a hard conversation, an appointment, or simply an ordinary day that feels uncertain. Your body can respond to the anticipation as strongly as it would to the event.

That dread is real, even when the thing you're dreading turns out fine.

What's one thing that triggers this kind of dread for you? Tell us below.

People often come in thinking their problem is anxiety. Or burnout. Or that they're just not sleeping well.

And sometimes, over time, it becomes clear that underneath the sleep disruption and the low energy and the difficulty concentrating and the way relationships feel like work, there's trauma doing its long, quiet work.

Trauma doesn't announce itself. It doesn't always look like flashbacks or obvious distress. Sometimes it looks like ordinary exhaustion that won't lift. A flatness you can't explain. A nervous system that was asked to work overtime for too long and hasn't yet had the chance to fully rest.

This isn't weakness. It's a physiological reality, and it responds to physiological care, which is part of why body-based therapy can reach what talk therapy alone sometimes doesn't.

If any of this resonates, I'd gently encourage you to book a free consultation.

Free 15-minute consult at anotherchapter.ca, in-person in Kelowna, virtual throughout BC.

Most people know about fight or flight. Fewer know about freeze or fawn — and understanding all four can genuinely change how you relate to yourself.

Your nervous system has one job: keep you alive. When it detects a threat — real or perceived, current or echoed from the past — it activates one of these four responses. Not because you chose to, but because your survival circuitry is faster than your conscious thought.

This is why you can walk away from a hard conversation feeling ashamed of how you responded. Why you freeze up in exactly the situations where you most want to be present. Why you people-please even when you know you're doing it.

This carousel breaks down each of the four survival responses and what they look like in everyday life. The goal isn't to diagnose — it's to help you see your own patterns with a little more compassion and a little less self-judgment.

Book a free 15-minute consult at anotherchapter.ca

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There's a Japanese art form called kintsugi — the practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. The cracks aren't hidden. They're highlighted. The philosophy is that the break is part of the object's history, and the repair is what makes it remarkable.

I think about this a lot in the context of healing.

So many people come into therapy wanting to get back to who they were before. Before the trauma, before the loss, before the burnout took hold. But healing rarely works that way. You don't return to before. You become someone who has been through something and carries it differently — integrated rather than avoided, present rather than buried.

That's not a consolation prize. That's often where real strength comes from.

The parts of you that you think make you broken? They're the ones worth understanding.

Free 15-minute consultation at anotherchapter.ca

Ready to rock some more comedy, hosting and talks!

Links are in my bio if you wanna join any of the events and shows! 🥰

There are COUNTLESS times I have been in front of audiences ✨

My happy place is being in front of people creating and entertaining experience!

These days I am mostly doing educational speaking, laughter ceremony, comedy and hosting 🎤

I often hear that my life has been incredibly random…
And they would be right!

I truly believe all of it was aligned to help me help others through joy, laughter and trauma-informed care!

If you want me at your next event, reach out! I’d love to chat details on making your day magical!

Have I been living my dreams?
100% YES