Another Chapter Counselling

Sometimes the hardest part isn't the event itself. It's the days leading up to it. 🎯

Anticipatory anxiety is the dread that builds before something happens, whether it's a hard conversation, an appointment, or simply an ordinary day that feels uncertain. Your body can respond to the anticipation as strongly as it would to the event.

That dread is real, even when the thing you're dreading turns out fine.

What's one thing that triggers this kind of dread for you? Tell us below.

People often come in thinking their problem is anxiety. Or burnout. Or that they're just not sleeping well.

And sometimes, over time, it becomes clear that underneath the sleep disruption and the low energy and the difficulty concentrating and the way relationships feel like work, there's trauma doing its long, quiet work.

Trauma doesn't announce itself. It doesn't always look like flashbacks or obvious distress. Sometimes it looks like ordinary exhaustion that won't lift. A flatness you can't explain. A nervous system that was asked to work overtime for too long and hasn't yet had the chance to fully rest.

This isn't weakness. It's a physiological reality, and it responds to physiological care, which is part of why body-based therapy can reach what talk therapy alone sometimes doesn't.

If any of this resonates, I'd gently encourage you to book a free consultation.

Free 15-minute consult at anotherchapter.ca, in-person in Kelowna, virtual throughout BC.

Most people know about fight or flight. Fewer know about freeze or fawn — and understanding all four can genuinely change how you relate to yourself.

Your nervous system has one job: keep you alive. When it detects a threat — real or perceived, current or echoed from the past — it activates one of these four responses. Not because you chose to, but because your survival circuitry is faster than your conscious thought.

This is why you can walk away from a hard conversation feeling ashamed of how you responded. Why you freeze up in exactly the situations where you most want to be present. Why you people-please even when you know you're doing it.

This carousel breaks down each of the four survival responses and what they look like in everyday life. The goal isn't to diagnose — it's to help you see your own patterns with a little more compassion and a little less self-judgment.

Book a free 15-minute consult at anotherchapter.ca

awn

There's a Japanese art form called kintsugi — the practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. The cracks aren't hidden. They're highlighted. The philosophy is that the break is part of the object's history, and the repair is what makes it remarkable.

I think about this a lot in the context of healing.

So many people come into therapy wanting to get back to who they were before. Before the trauma, before the loss, before the burnout took hold. But healing rarely works that way. You don't return to before. You become someone who has been through something and carries it differently — integrated rather than avoided, present rather than buried.

That's not a consolation prize. That's often where real strength comes from.

The parts of you that you think make you broken? They're the ones worth understanding.

Free 15-minute consultation at anotherchapter.ca

Ready to rock some more comedy, hosting and talks!

Links are in my bio if you wanna join any of the events and shows! 🥰

There are COUNTLESS times I have been in front of audiences ✨

My happy place is being in front of people creating and entertaining experience!

These days I am mostly doing educational speaking, laughter ceremony, comedy and hosting 🎤

I often hear that my life has been incredibly random…
And they would be right!

I truly believe all of it was aligned to help me help others through joy, laughter and trauma-informed care!

If you want me at your next event, reach out! I’d love to chat details on making your day magical!

Have I been living my dreams?
100% YES

Overworking until collapse. Putting everyone else's needs first. Saying yes when you mean no. Shutting down when things get too hard.

If you recognize any of these, you're probably not proud of them. You might have tried to change them more than once and been frustrated when they came back.

Here's something that tends to shift things: these patterns aren't personality defects. They're adaptations. They developed because at some point, in some context, they worked. They kept you safe, kept the peace, kept things functional.

The problem is that strategies can outlive their usefulness. And when they do, they stop being protective and start being the thing you need protection from.

Noticing the pattern without judgment is the first step. Understanding where it came from is the next. Therapy is for the step after that.

Free 15-minute consultation at anotherchapter.ca

There's a word a lot of my clients use: stuck.

Stuck in a pattern they can see but can't seem to change. Stuck in grief that should be moving but isn't. Stuck between knowing what they want and being unable to do it.

From the outside, and often from the inside too, stuck can look a lot like failure. Like weakness. Like not trying hard enough.

But from a nervous system perspective, stuck is protection. The freeze response is a biological state the nervous system activates when fight or flight aren't available options. It's the body pressing pause on forward movement because, at some level, it doesn't yet register that it's safe to go.

You can't think your way out of freeze, and you can't willpower through it. But you can work with it, slowly and safely, by helping your nervous system build the conditions for movement.

That's some of what therapy is for.

Free 15-minute consultation at anotherchapter.ca.

The body keeps score. You may have heard this phrase. but what does it actually mean?

It means that the nervous system stores experience. Not as memory in the way we usually think of memory, but as a felt, physical residue. A bracing. A holding. A pattern of tension or numbness or hyperactivation that lives in the body long after the conscious mind has moved on.

This is why you can know something is in the past and still feel it in the present. Why knowing you're safe doesn't always make you feel safe. Why some things land harder than they logically should.

This carousel breaks down five ways the body tends to store what we've been through. not to pathologize, but to help you start reading your own signals with a little more compassion and a little less judgment.

Book a free 15-minute consult with Paige at anotherchapter.ca