Mental Health Therapy
At CUCUMBER, we approach Mental Health Therapy through an integrative, trauma-informed lens that looks beyond surface symptoms to address underlying causes.
We don’t believe mood disorders emerge from nowhere. Collaboratively, we will explore how your history, relationships, and nervous system responses shape the way you experience yourself, others, and the world.
AKA Therapy for Anxiety & Depression
We will work together on a tailored plan to support you in reconnecting with a sense of safety, strength, and emotional presence—because it’s hard to focus on growth when your inner alarm system is stuck on high alert.
Please note that if you're accessing sex therapy, your therapist may recommend that we explore mental health concerns concurrently, where relevant, to ensure a more effective result.
Anxiety and depression are often two sides of the same coin emerging from a nervous system that is stuck in a chronic stress response to perceived threats.
Anxiety can be understood as a form of Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn. In fact in session, anxiety is understood as activation. The problem is not that there is a present fear-response, the problem may be that everyday safe stimuli is being unconsciously categorised as a threat.
Stimuli may include the external or internal world. For instance, some emotions and thoughts can trigger a threat response, while other times it may be a person, situation, or environment.
When the body can not sustain the level of energy expenditure necessary to try and deal with the perceived threat it collapses into a depressed and/or dissociative state.
If anxiety is urgency, depression is helplessness.
These are natural and necessary states for the body to function, but in excess being in them can be debilitating.
Anxiety and depression therapy is about learning to heal the mind/body connection as it relates to threat detection and response. If needed, it is also about increasing the tolerance to uncomfortable states so that fear does not trigger unhelpful patterns that have kept you stuck in the past.