Natalia Lysenko

How can you keep caring for others when it is so difficult to care for yourself?

Those with great empathy, like you, often struggle to balance everyone’s needs.  You balance others’ needs amazingly, and sometimes you get credit for it, but often that’s at the expense of your own needs.  Your needs also must factor in.  

Caring for others as you do is both a blessing and a curse.  It’s more of a blessing, sure, but the guilt is profound.  The “guilt toll” gets you coming and going, in that you feel guilty even when (or especially when) you’re doing what’s right.  In so many of those cases you second-guess what is right and second-guess yourself.  It’s a difficult cycle to break.  Logic, your great strength, may not always help.

What has caused you to overdose on guilt lately?  It could be just about anything: the loss of a parent, needing to care for a family member, needing to take time to resolve depression, needing to spend more time or less time on a relationship, difficulties in step-parenting, difficulties in splitting up parental duties with your spouse, or the eternally tricky family relationships.

Though I can help with a wide range of challenges, if you’ve found me and you’ve read this far, guilt is probably a recurring theme in your life.  So, in a nutshell, I am here to help you feel less guilt about caring for yourself more.

I’m not here to tell you that whatever feels right is right, or that you should care less, or even that you shouldn’t feel guilt.  That tension is part of what makes you you.  Rather, I can help you maintain healthy levels or types of guilt, so that you can help others (as always) while moving your life in the direction you’d like.

Only you can care for yourself.  I’m just here to help you actually do it.

We can meet in-person here in Guelph, or in an online setting, or a little of each (whatever is more convenient for you).  Contact me to book a free 20-minute consultation.  I look forward to getting to know you.

My philosophy & approach to therapy

I work with adults and can help with depression, anxiety, grief, moral injury, dealing with overwhelming emotions, understanding why emotions surprise you, establishing better boundaries in personal and professional relationships, personality adaptations (more often referred to as personality disorders), relationship issues, and overcoming the impact of attachment trauma – to name a few challenges.

I am fascinated with human resilience and our capacity to learn, grow, and evolve.  Each of us has the inner wisdom required for that.  My goal as a psychotherapist is not to impose on you solutions that worked for other people but rather to help you discover solutions that work for you.  I bring to this process the knowledge of theory and you bring your knowledge of self and your life experiences.  Together we can explore how you would like your life to be different as a result of therapy and how to get there in a way that makes sense to you.  Depending on your view of therapy as a shorter or a longer process, we can concentrate on immediate symptom relief, a deeper exploration of issues, or both.  What matters is that what we do in therapy is aligned with your personal goals.

It’s important to use a therapeutic modality that is appropriate for what you are dealing with.  However, even more important (in my opinion) is that you feel truly heard.  I most often practice therapy using such modalities as acceptance commitment therapy, emotionally focused therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders, polyvagal-informed, as well as trauma- and grief-informed approaches.  I use them within the larger framework of attachment theory, which explores how early life experiences may have contributed to your view of self, others, and the world.  I believe that we do what we do for a reason, even if we no longer remember what that reason is or never truly became aware of it.  Awareness of what our behaviour accomplishes gives us a chance to become more intentional about it.

With couples, I bring to therapy psychobiological-approach-informed practices. This includes understanding of partners’ nervous systems as well as looking at a couple as one emotional biosphere where two people influence each other. It is also combined with understanding of partners’ attachment patterns and how they influence the relationship. I also appreciate the additional challenges involved in being parents in a step-family and can help you navigate those.