Explore, Discover, Understand and Change
At times, life can appear confusing and unclear. Gain insight, focus and understanding through psychotherapy.
WELCOME TO MY PROFESSIONAL HOME
I applaud the courage it takes to look for a therapist.
At J R Garber Psychology Professional Corporation, I am dedicated to helping you navigate life's challenges. I provide compassionate support and evidence-based strategies to promote mental well-being and personal growth.
Your journey towards healing starts with a better understanding of why you are looking for help.
You are a step closer to where you need to be
Looking for help is not a sign of weakness, rather it is a sign of inner strength or resilience
Resilience is the capacity to adapt, recover, and continue moving forward after difficulty, stress, or loss. It doesn’t mean someone isn’t affected by hardship. Instead, it means they can bend without breaking and gradually reorganize themselves after challenges.
What Resilience Actually Is
Resilience is often misunderstood as toughness or suppression of feelings. In reality, it is closer to flexibility.
People who are resilient typically can:
• Experience distress without being overwhelmed by it
• Maintain a sense of hope or future orientation
• Find meaning or learning in adversity
• Seek and accept support
• Regulate emotions and return to equilibrium
Research in fields like Developmental Psychology and Clinical Psychology shows resilience is not a fixed personality trait. It is a set of capacities that can be developed and restored.
How We Acquire Resilience
Resilience usually develops through three main pathways.
1. Early secure relationships
Children who experience consistent care tend to develop:
• emotional safety
• internalized support
• confidence exploring the world
A secure attachment gives a child an internal message:
“When things go wrong, someone helps me regulate and recover.”
Over time, this becomes self-regulation.
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2. Experiencing manageable adversity
Interestingly, resilience does not come from an easy life.
It grows when people experience a challenge that they can survive and make sense of.
It has been described as “ordinary magic”—the natural capacity of humans to adapt when basic supports are in place.
When people face difficulty and eventually overcome it, they acquire:
• mastery
• confidence
• problem-solving ability
• tolerance for uncertainty
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3. Developing internal skills
These include:
• emotional regulation
• realistic thinking
• problem solving
• meaning-making
• self-compassion
These skills are strengthened through life experiences, mentoring, therapy, and reflection.
Why People Lose Their Sense of Resilience
People rarely lose resilience completely, but it can become buried or exhausted.
Common reasons include:
• chronic stress
• prolonged grief
• trauma
• burnout
• isolation
• loss of meaning or identity
In psychological terms, the nervous system becomes overloaded, and the person begins to feel:
• helpless
• depleted
• unable to recover from setbacks
This doesn’t mean resilience is gone—it means the systems that support it are overwhelmed.
How Resilience Is Regained
Resilience is rebuilt by moving towards recreating some of the same dynamics and foundations that created it.
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1. Safe relationships
Connection is the most powerful regulator of human stress.
Supportive relationships restore:
• emotional regulation
• hope
• perspective
• belonging
This is why therapy itself can help rebuild resilience.
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2. Re-establishing agency
Small experiences of control and competence rebuild confidence.
Examples:
• solving manageable problems
• physical activity
• meaningful work
• learning something new
These experiences re-teach the nervous system:
“I can influence what happens to me.”
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3. Making meaning of hardship
People regain resilience when adversity becomes integrated into their life story rather than something that only overwhelms them.
We know that we can endure tremendous difficulty when we can find meaning in it.
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4. Regulating the Body
Resilience has a biological component as well. Practices that help regulate the nervous system can restore resilience, including:
- Sufficient sleep
- Regular exercise
- Controlled breathing
- Mindfulness practices
- Spending time in nature
These strategies can help the brain shift out of chronic threat mode.
An Important Idea About Resilience
One of the most important findings in resilience research is:
Resilient people are not people who never feel as if they are falling apart.
They are people who:
• think they may be "falling apart."
• regroup
• rebuild
• and continue.
In that sense, resilience is really the capacity to repair oneself after disruption.
Many psychologists have noticed a paradox:
Some of the most capable, accomplished, and outwardly resilient people reach a point in life where their sense of resilience seems to collapse. They feel exhausted, uncertain, or emotionally overwhelmed in ways that surprise them.
Often, it is a transition in how resilience works.
Such experiences are NOT usually a failure of resilience but a change in how it works.
- In earlier adulthood, resilience is often built around:
• competence
• productivity
• solving problems
• pushing through adversity
• fulfilling roles (parent, professional, partner)
Resilience here often looks like:
“I can manage this. I can work harder. I can solve the problem.”
It is action-based resilience.
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2. The "Midlife" Turning Point. At some point, many people encounter challenges that cannot be solved with effort alone:
• aging
• losses of relationships, capability or stability
• children growing independent
• changes in identity
• illness or vulnerability
• existential questions
The strategies that worked for decades may suddenly feel insufficient.
Some have suggested that this time in one's life is when one confronts parts of oneself that one previously ignored.
It can be described as:
“This change in my life must have a different meaning than the life I had before.”
When Resilience Feels Like It’s Gone
What people often experience during this period:
• fatigue from carrying responsibility for years
• questioning long-held assumptions
• loss of certainty
• emotional vulnerability that was previously contained
It can feel like resilience has disappeared, but what is actually happening is that the old form of resilience is no longer sufficient.
You are being pushed toward a deeper form of adaptation that can serve them going forward.
A Second Adaptive Form of Resilience
Later resilience tends to look different.
Instead of control and effort, it involves:
• acceptance of limitations
• emotional openness
• deeper relationships
• meaning rather than achievement
• integration of vulnerability
Psychologists sometimes describe this as psychological integration.
The Paradox
Interestingly, people who go through this transition often develop stronger resilience than before, but it looks different.
Earlier resilience says:
“I can overcome anything.”
Later resilience says:
“Life contains difficulty, but I can live meaningfully within it.”
This shift can lead to:
• greater wisdom
• emotional depth
• compassion for others
• a stronger sense of purpose
A Finding From Resilience Research
Long-term studies by psychologists found something striking:
The people who changed the most successfully were not those who avoided hardship.
They were the people who:
• developed adaptive coping mechanisms
• maintained close relationships
• allowed themselves to grow psychologically over time
Growth and Healing Through Psychotherapy
What can Psychotherapy do for you
It can help you more fully understand and, thereafter, find ways to reduce the types of psychological difficulties that prevent you from fully experiencing life, opportunity, and relationships. Depression, anxiety, relational and familial difficulties, work-related struggles and disappointments, as well as major mental illness, can rob you of much of what life has to offer.
IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY
The type of treatment that I provide
I offer psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy. It is a type of talk therapy that focuses on how unconscious thoughts, early-life experiences, and internal conflicts influence current emotions, behaviours, and relationships. The basic assumption is that many psychological difficulties come from unresolved emotional conflicts, often rooted in childhood or past relationships, which continue to operate outside conscious awareness.
Psychodynamic therapy helps a person bring these patterns into awareness so they can be better identified, understood, and ultimately changed.
What happens during sessions
I try to help you explore thoughts and feelings that may not be fully conscious but can, nonetheless, influence your behaviour.
An example of some such difficulties would be:
- Finding yourself in repeated dissatisfying relationship patterns
- Recurrent difficulties with employers and/or employees.
- Frustrating and intense interactions with partners, spouses, children and parents.
- Strong emotional reactions that feel confusing and unsettling.
- The emotional pain of losing a loved one can help you explore thoughts and feelings that may not be fully conscious but can unknowingly influence your behaviour.
I try to provide clients with a supportive, compassionate, and safe space to experience, express, and begin to understand their feelings. Together, we can work towards changing the behavioural patterns that contribute to these dissatisfying life experiences.
Influence of Early Relationships
- Experiences with parents or caregivers, disturbing family life experiences, life trauma or early loss often shape expectations about relationships later in life. Unbeknownst to you, you may be experiencing:
• Fear of abandonment
• Difficulty trusting others
• Strong need for approval
- A fear of intimacy
As well as other psychological tendencies that can influence the partner you choose, the relations you develop and the struggles you continue to have.
Patterns in Relationships and Career Satisfaction
Psychodynamically oriented therapy typically looks at recurring interpersonal patterns, such as:
- Finding yourself in recurrent, dissatisfying relationships
- Repeating interpersonal conflicts
- Avoiding closeness
- Not being able to maximize your career potential or opportunities.
- Experiencing ongoing challenges with colleagues, whether they report to you or you report to them.
Insight and Emotional Understanding
One of the goals of our work is to develop a greater understanding of who you are and how you became this way. Some refer to this as acquiring insight, but insight is not enough. Insight needs to lead to fundamental changes in behaviour. A deeper understanding of oneself can lead to emotional and behavioural change.
This includes:
• Recognizing defenses
• Understanding motivations
• Integrating past experiences
The goal is to make changes in the way we behave :
Modern psychodynamic therapy is essentially a focused exploration of emotional and relational patterns, helping people understand why they react the way they do and, if they see the need, change those patterns. My approach focuses on helping you gain insight through psychodynamic psychotherapy, and then using tools from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to change unwanted habits or reactions.