Guiding you toward emotional awareness, balance and flow.
Welcome to River Stones Counselling!
My name is Paula van Riel.
I'm a Registered Psychotherapist and the owner of River Stones Counselling. If you have found your way here you have taken the brave step of reaching out for support with finding relief from the pain that arises when your feelings overwhelm you. My belief is that you are meant to have company in these hard places. Rather than ignore, dismiss or push away your feelings, they are meant to be shared, witnessed and held.
The trouble is that feelings don't go anywhere until they are acknowledged, felt and allowed to move through you. In fact, denying your feelings causes them to pile up inside and leak out in harmful ways, often causing issues like stress, anxiety, low self esteem, relationship conflict, addiction and depression.
Emotions are a vital source of self knowledge that ensures your decisions are in alignment with your core values, your true needs and your inner wisdom. You miss out on this essential input when you only listen to your thoughts, causing you to experience uncertainty, self doubt or inflexibility.
When you make space for your emotional experience you can operate from a more grounded place that lends credence to both external and internal feedback, allowing you to expand your perspective and invite compassion for self and other.
But knowing how to make friends with your feelings is rarely something that is taught and the message is often that emotions are a problem that you need to ignore or overcome. This leaves you stuck carrying the weight of your unprocessed emotions which throws you off balance and adversely impacts your mental state, your physical well being, your relationships and your sense of self.
Using an emotionally focused, trauma informed and somatically dynamic approach we will explore those unacknowledged parts of yourself, and gently move toward befriending your feelings, listening to your body, and learning to trust your inner wisdom. Like a stone in a river, shaped by the water's ebb and flow, so too are we shaped by the current of life. Tuning into the flow of emotions opens up the possibility for understanding, self compassion and growth, allowing you to strengthen the core parts of yourself and appreciate the wisdom of your wounded parts can offer you.
Emotionally Focused therapy is a modality that is largely based on attachment theory that contends that our emotional connection to caring others is essential for our well being, our growth and our ability to adapt to the stressors of life. When attachment wounds have occurred and are not repaired, those wounds lead to coping strategies that keep us stuck in anxiety, fear, and isolation.
Reconnecting with your emotions with the help of a caring therapist can help heal those wounds and you shift toward emotionally balanced relationships with yourself and others and allows you to more easily adapt to the ebb and flow of life. When you know how to makes use of the information your emotions are offering you, more options become open to you in how you choose to show up in the world, in relationships, and with yourself.