Posts by Valerie Varan

You struggle to keep your focus and attention on the task at hand. You may feel that job after job bores you, so you switch around frequently, perhaps making the decision impulsively. Appearing hyperactive to others, you might find yourself jumping from one thing and bounding to the next. In relationships, you find yourself leaping from partner to partner. Maybe they leave complaining you aren’t ever reliable, or you end the relationship in a short time out of frustration or because you found the next love interest. We all get bored at times and find ourselves distracted. But if your problem with inattention has significantly affected your life, then it is time to get help. Holistic counseling offers the following solutions.

• Nutritional assessment is essential. Many clients who have struggled with ADHD have been found to be addicted, so to speak, to sugar. Their diets are largely simple refined carbohydrates, and are deficient in needed vitamins and minerals. This can affect the nervous system, lead to hormonal imbalance, and result in mood and behavioral symptoms.
• Psychoeducation and behavioral therapy are primary. You will need to learn how the brain rehardwires itself continuously (i.e. brain plasticity) to meet the demands placed upon it, so that you can retrain it. In our society, with so many people reared with wild special effects television, highly interactive video games/computers, and the like, it is no wonder that the brain can no longer relax. You will have to reprogram it and I will teach you how. My clients have found significant relief from this treatment alone, though it does take some time.
• Behavior management and social skills are essential for helping young people to manage school and home tasks, and adults to organize and perform better especially at work.
• You will want to find out if learning disorders or giftedness issues have become a problem.
• Coping skills can help you deal with frustration and stress.
• Mind-body techniques and counseling can help with the accompanying depression, anxiety, or self-esteem issues that tend to arise.
• Bioenergetic techniques may be useful in “resetting” your biology.
• Medications are available to help. They can provide relief until new “reprogramming” skills and bioenergetic exercises help you rehardwire your mindbody, and your neurotransmitters (e.g. dopamine) adjust. Because long-term effects have not been studied, most of my clients prefer to not medicate their children or teens due to the risk of side effects or suicide, except in cases of extreme aggression. Adult clients have sometimes chosen to use medications temporarily to be able to function better at work.
• Family treatment is extremely important. Most parents of ADHD children are overwhelmed. Families benefit from communication in a structured setting. Parents can learn more helpful techniques for setting boundaries and limits, establishing age-appropriate rules and following through. In addition, parents often need help becoming more consistent and calm in the home, since chaotic energy is passed around from parents to children, as well as from children to parents.

Call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more! 

Obsessions and Compulsions – Perhaps you find yourself ruminating on certain thoughts over and over, and you can’t let it go. Maybe you find yourself repeating certain behaviors ritualistically because it makes you feel better. You tend to feel highly anxious, and may begin to be depressed because of the time these rituals are taking in your day.

If so, holistic counseling offers:

• Behavioral therapies like exposure and response prevention, as well as skills training to help you recognize the extent of anxiety associated with various situations, and support you as conquer increasingly fearful challenges
• Cognitive therapies that help you challenge beliefs that may no longer serve you
• Bioenergetic and movement therapies that have been found to help balance out the body’s neurotransmitters (e.g. serotonin) without the use of medication
• Nutrition that helps you decrease feelings of anxiety within the body
• Somatic and spiritual therapies, which help you see how your outer attachment to certain thoughts and behaviors may reflect deeper difficulties at a spiritual level

Call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.              

Mood Swings/Bipolar – If you experience moods that fluctuate from feeling really low to really high, you may be experiencing bipolar mood shifts. Some people bounce from depression to high irritation or anger. Others may feel extreme impulsivity or a mania that feels like being in fast motion.

If this sounds like you, you may first want your physician to rule out the following:

• A medical condition may be creating these symptoms
• Certain types of eating and digestive patterns, nutritional deficiencies and food allergies can actually lead to symptoms such as depression, irritability, anger and anxiety

Holistic ways of treating this condition without medication include:

• Bioenergetic methods may particularly helpful for insufficient movement and circulation that can lead to depression-like fatigue and biochemical imbalance (e.g. norepinephrine)
• Training in mind-body relaxation strategies, including yoga, biofeedback and mindfulness meditation
• Psychoeducation and behavioral therapies can help you retrain your brain, which rehardwires itself continuously (i.e. brain plasticity) to meet the demands placed upon it
• When needed, cognitive-behavioral therapies help you realistically assess others’ motivations/behaviors, and choose more useful social/behavioral responses
• Nutritional support

Call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.

You may feel fearful about the future in many aspects of your life. Some people dread being in social situations. Others may experience intense reactions to places or things. Your heartbeat begins to race. Your palms may get sweaty. Breathing can become difficult. Your body�s responses rage out of control and you suddenly feel limp. These are the varied faces of fear, anxiety, panic and phobia.

Anxiety is a normal reaction to uncertainty and danger. But when it begins to happen too frequently, take over your life or weaken your health, it is time to seek help from a professional. Holistic counseling can help you sort out your symptoms and heal the root causes of your anxiety. For instance:

• Signs of hypoglycemia include nervousness, sweating, palpitations, irritability, decreased concentration or mental confusion. We may want to see how your diet is worsening your symptoms and mimicking anxiety.
• Movement or exercise can help by balancing out the body’s oversupply of energy and stress hormones.
• Guided imagery, meditation, yoga, biofeedback and other mind-body relaxation strategies can often be as effective as anti-anxiety medication.
• As you learn how your thoughts and the meaning you attach to events are creating this mind-body physical reaction, you will feel increasingly empowered to prevent anxiety reactions from occurring.
• Bioenergetic techniques can help you unblock energy from areas in your body that tend to hold fear and panic responses. It’s similar to resetting a biological clock.

Call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more!

Depression – Longing to sleep all day? Struggling to get up and face another day? Not sure why you are crying so much? Have your eating habits changed? Do you feel little energy or motivation?

Depression can take many forms. Some people have felt gloomy their entire life and don’t know why. Others have noticed more recently that they just can’t shake the sadness, and are beginning to feel hopeless that things will ever get better. Perhaps they wonder if the world would be better off without them.

Holistic counseling can help you do more than reduce your symptoms. Together, we can help you heal your depression.

• A medical condition may be creating these symptoms
• Nutritional therapies can improve certain types of eating and digestive patterns, nutritional deficiencies (e.g. Omega-3 fatty acids) and food allergies that can actually lead to many of the same symptoms as depression
• Bioenergetic exercises can improve movement and circulation, which appear to increase endorphins (feel-good hormones), energy levels and motivation, as well as rebalance other chemicals like norepinephrine and serotonin
• Light and other energy-based therapies can improve depression associated with seasonal changes, weather patterns and geomagnetic stress from fluctuations in the earth’s rhythms
• The inability to relax may lead the body to feel chronically drained, for which mind-body relaxation or meditation strategies are especially useful

In addition, we will explore through our work together what’s been going on for you in your life. My experience has been that when we feel extreme sadness, it could be that we’re depressed, or we may be grieving a loss. Depression can result from self-defeating thought patterns, or from having given away our personal power to others. We feel powerless to live the life that authentically brings us joy. If we bounce from depression or really low energy to extremely high energy, we may be in need of balancing, rather than simply medicating ourselves for “bipolar” disorder. Perhaps we feel our depression switch rapidly to rage, angry with ourselves for letting our lives slip away.

Whichever way your feelings are coming up for you, your sense of well-being can be restored. To learn more, call me at 303.547.8327 and schedule a free initial 30-minute consultation.

Severe Depression: If you are feeling suicidal or homicidal, please call 911 for immediate medical care since I do not provide emergency services. I provide only outpatient level of care. I do send you special blessings for healing and love. Know that sometimes we do need the blessing of medicine, hospitalization or residential treatment during critical moments.  

If you are looking for a life coach for grief and loss, I can help.

There are many tragedies today that lead us to the time when we grieve for loved ones who are sick, dying or who have passed on. We also grieve for ourselves, our loss of health, love, youthfulness, income and stability. Perhaps for the loss of what might have been. Though we may grieve in different ways and for diverse reasons, the pain we feel is deep and may prevent us from functioning in other areas of our lives. The typical stages we go through when we are grieving include:

• Denial or a sense of numbness that helps us get through the initial shock of our loss
• Bargaining or persistent thoughts about what we could have done differently or better
• Guilt or feelings of remorse
• Depression, extreme loneliness or feeling sorry for ourselves
• Anger due to feeling abandoned or powerless
• Acceptance of the loss you have experienced and the beginning of healing

Grief counseling can support you as you express your loss, move through these various stages of pain, and say things you may not be able to say to family or friends. Crying and journaling can help you express emotions fully in healthy ways, so that you do not resort to the use of alcohol or other substances to repress them. Movement and bioenergetic methods can be used to help dislodge the trauma that gets stuck in your tissues and can cause physical pain. Call me at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.

Insomnia – Over time, not getting the right kind of refreshing sleep can result in mental and emotional imbalances. But it can also work the other way, for instance, when anxiety, fears, and traumas keep you awake at night. Together, we can help you discover what is at the root of your sleeping difficulties and come up with a plan that feels right for you. After ruling out medical conditions that cause insomnia, there are many intervention strategies you can use as an alternative to medication. I can assist you with:

• Stress reduction and relaxation techniques
• Environments and routines that promote faster and deeper sleep
• Changing behaviors that affect the brain’s ability to wind down
• Foods to choose and to avoid
• Additional complementary methods to consider

Call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn even more!

Living with chronic stress is the way of our times. Hectic schedules, high expectations to do more in less time, messages that we are supposed to be perfect and please others, job performance anxiety, apprehension over being laid off, worries about paying the bills, fear for the safety of those we love, concern that others will criticize and laugh at us when they find out we’re “not good enough”…these are the daily stressors that we live with, and they pile up over time. Pushed beyond our limits, we still don’t find time to relax and enjoy ourselves. We develop aches and pains, and the next thing we hear is that we have a medical condition that requires extensive treatment. Coping with chronic pain and the stress of multiple doctors telling us we need one more drug or one more surgery is often more than we can bear. This does not have to be.

Through cognitive-behavioral methods, biofeedback, mindfulness and relaxation strategies, stress-reduction and other holistic approaches, learn how to:

• Bring yourself into a state of relaxation
• Reduce existing pain and stress levels
• Discover the root issue that for you created this exhausting way of life in the first place
• See things from a fresh perspective
• Change your mental and emotional  reactions to stressful situations
• Use movement/exercise to release natural endorphins
• Support your body’s ability to relax using food and nutrition

You will receive all the support you need as you create a new way of being that feels not only realistic to implement, but also authentic, balanced and energized.

Call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more!