Individual, Marriage and Family Counseling
At Cancer Care Northwest, we offer in-house professional counseling to help patients, couples, children and families understand and better manage the anxiety, depression and other emotional struggles of living with cancer.
Our licensed therapists specialize in a type of therapy that addresses these challenges. They are highly trained and experienced in assisting people, most of whom have never had therapy before, through the seven predictable crisis points of cancer:
- Diagnosis
- Beginning of treatment
- Mid-way through treatment
- End of treatment
- Diagnosis of reoccurrence
- Terminal diagnosis
- Death
With their expert guidance, you and your loved ones can navigate the difficult journey through cancer, overcome emotional and social challenges, and live each day to its fullest.
Fear Management and Relaxation Techniques
Learn specialized techniques to manage your fear, pain and anxiety. Our therapists provide training and practice in:
- Awareness & Mindfulness: Learn how to recognize, observe, and regulate physical, emotional, and mental responses to external and internal stresses.
- Breathing Exercises: Learn the fastest way to help yourself relax.
- Challenging Unsafe Beliefs: Learn to challenge distorted thinking, fear based belief systems, and ingrained patterns that are no longer beneficial or useful in order to create new beliefs and practices that can help with self acceptance and healing.
- Creating time-limited intentional worry time: Learn to focus fearful thoughts so that they don’t leak throughout your whole day or night.
- Distraction Skills: Learn to refocus your mind when you become stuck in fearful thoughts.
- Dropping Stories: Learn to recognize truth versus mental flights of the imagination that stir up and create fear.
- Emotional Regulation: Learn to use skills to manage uncomfortable feelings.
- Family Assessment: Create a Family of Origin diagram with that illuminates your feelings about family members and how they impact your life today.
- Guided Imagery: Learn to use your mind to impact changes in your body.
- Interpersonal Effectiveness: Learn to eliminate assumptions about relationships, suspend judgments, identify destructive behaviors, and repair and make amends with others.
- Relaxation Exercises (in session or CD): Learn to pause and relieve tension with meditation skills and breathing exercises in order to calm physical responses to internal and external stress.
- Self Soothing: Learn how to talk yourself through difficult situations to create a calm inner self.
- Staying Present: Learn to keep your thoughts in the “here and now” instead of trapping yourself in fears of the future or sufferings from the past.
Marriage and Couples Counseling
Reestablish your connection with each other. Our therapists can help you and your spouse or partner:
- Eliminate communication barriers.
- Understand and cope with issues involving sexuality and intimacy.
- Work effectively as a team.
- Adapt to lifestyle changes, such as household responsibilities, financial challenges and other stresses related to cancer.
Family Counseling
Explore ways to keep your family-unit strong throughout your journey with cancer. Our therapists can help you and your family members:
- Maintain open communication lines.
- Learn to support and console each other.
- Deal with pre-existing family dysfunctions or unresolved grief.
- Understand and respect various methods of coping.
- Use age appropriate responses to your children’s questions about cancer.
- Cope with the loss of a loved one.
Survivor Counseling
Adapt to life after cancer. Our therapists can help you heal the wounds to the heart, mind and soul that can linger long after your cancer treatment is done. Learn to apply the strength and wisdom you built throughout your treatment to life after treatment.
Chemical Dependency Counseling
Our counseling services team includes a certified chemical dependency counselor. Her expertise is available to patients who need help overcoming and/or coping with drug or alcohol addiction.