Online Psychodynamic Therapy
Online Psychodynamic Therapy
Five Seas Integrative Therapy
Karen Baker, Registered Psychotherapist
Online Psychodynamic Therapy
Five Seas Integrative Therapy
Karen Baker, Registered Psychotherapist
Areas of Focus
I see symptoms as adaptations that no longer serve us, rather than pathology - the nervous system's understandable attempts to respond to overwhelming (or unmet) relational needs, particularly during formative years. Understood this way, chronic anxiety, numbing-out, perfectionism, or people-pleasing are evidence of a system that adapted to survive conditions it couldn't otherwise manage.
I work with a wide range of people - some navigating a specific, identifiable wound, others simply feeling stuck, disconnected, or like they're running on fumes. Whatever we're working with - complex trauma, a persistent sense of not fitting in, relationship patterns that feel inescapable, or a longing to feel more at home in one's own body or life - the process is always approached with regulation at the foundation.
Are any of the patterns below familiar? They aren't fixed traits - they're stories the nervous system tells us when it's stuck in a habitual survival state. Recognizing the state behind the story, and acknowledging the message it was trying to send, can be the first steps toward finding the relief we long for.
Life may look manageable from the outside - work happens, relationships continue, things get done - but underneath, there's a hum of tension that never relents, even in moments of rest. Sleep may not feel restful, the way it should. The body often knows something the mind hasn't caught up to yet: that it has been bracing for a long time. As this gets witnessed and understood, the hum can begin to quiet. Rest starts to actually restore, and calm becomes something the body can trust again.
The same kind of relationship, again and again, even with entirely different people. The same argument, the same withdrawal, the same feeling of being unseen or unheard. These patterns can feel like fate, or personality, or bad luck: rather than what they often are - old strategies, formed early, still quietly running in the background. When the old pattern is met rather than fought, the intention behind the strategy can be examined and understood. Then, genuine connection becomes more possible: being seen and heard by someone, without the familiar bracing for disappointment underneath it.
Some people describe not fully knowing what they feel, or want, or need, as if those questions were never really invited when they were young. Life can be lived competently and still feel strangely distant, like it's happening from somewhere just outside the body. With genuine curiosity and support, the questions of what you feel, want, or need can stop feeling foreign. Life starts to be lived from inside the body again, with a growing sense of clarity about who you are and what matters to you.
A voice that is more critical than any outside observer would be. Achievements that don't seem to land. Mistakes that seem to confirm something already believed to be true. This kind of shame rarely announces itself as shame. More often it just sounds like the truth. Tending to the logic driving the critic, rather than wrestling with it, can loosen its hold, and something more compassionate can take its place, a voice capable of meeting mistakes, and achievements, with curiosity rather than judgment.
The yes is out of your mouth before the no has a chance. The calendar fills, the favour is accepted, the request is met. The cost doesn't announce itself right away, it accumulates quietly, and by the time it surfaces, it's wearing the face of exhaustion, or a short temper, or a slow withdrawal from the very person the yes was for. If we get curious about (and start to understand) why, eventually, a pause opens up where there wasn't one before, room enough to sense the cost before agreeing to it, and the confidence to let the no be heard.
Wanting closeness and fearing it. Wanting independence and feeling guilty for it. Having a hard time knowing where one person ends and another begins, or the opposite: feeling like true closeness has never quite been possible. Through our work together, closeness and independence stop feeling like a contradiction. Connection becomes possible without losing yourself in it, and autonomy without the accompanying guilt.