Navigating Winter: Understanding Seasonal Depression and Caring for Your Mental Health
Explore the connection between seasonal depression, daylight, and mental health in BC, including how morning light, light therapy, and everyday habits can support winter wellbeing. Learn practical strategies for navigating the darker months and when counselling or additional support may help.
Meet Anna Barabanova: Certified Schema Therapist & EMDR Provider
Anna Barabanova is a Registered Clinical Counsellor and Advanced Level Certified Schema Therapist who joins Being and Becoming with over ten years of experience supporting complex trauma, grief, and relationship patterns through schema therapy, EMDR, and CBT. She offers warm, hands-on sessions in English and Russian, in person in Burnaby and online across BC.
Breathing Your Way to Calm: Evidence-Based Practices for Mental Health
Breathing is one of the few bodily functions you can consciously control, making it a powerful tool for calming anxiety and stress. This guide walks through six breathing techniques, the science behind how each one works, and tips for building a practice that actually sticks.
Compassion Needs Boundaries
We often think compassion means being endlessly patient, understanding, and available — but compassion without boundaries can quietly turn into self-abandonment, over-functioning, or enabling harmful patterns. This piece explores why boundaries aren't the opposite of compassion, but what make it sustainable and real.
High-Functioning Anxiety: When Everything Looks Fine on the Outside
Success and anxiety can exist side by side, even when no one else can tell. This post explores what high-functioning anxiety looks like and why it's often the hardest kind to recognize — even in yourself.
Are You Really Setting a Boundary?
This article explores the difference between boundaries, requests, and demands, and why understanding that difference matters in our relationships. Learn how boundaries can protect your needs and limits while respecting the autonomy of others.
Welcoming Chloe Sernasie to Being and Becoming Counselling and Wellness Services
Meet Chloe Sernasie, a Master’s counselling student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) completing her practicum at Being and Becoming. She offers affordable, collaborative, trauma-informed counselling for youth and adults in Burnaby and online across British Columbia, with a particular interest in anxiety, depression, relationships, self-worth, identity, grief and loss, and life transitions.
Welcoming Tara McSweeney to Being and Becoming Counselling and Wellness Services
Meet Tara, a Registered Clinical Counsellor and UBC PhD student who is completing a practicum at Being and Becoming. Tara provides collaborative, trauma-informed counselling in Burnaby and online across British Columbia. She has particular interests in supporting neurodivergent and disabled clients, as well as those navigating eating disorders, body image, identity, relationships, and marginalization.
Understanding Complex Trauma: How Survival Strategies Shape the Present
Complex trauma develops through repeated or prolonged experiences that can shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and respond to the world around us. This article explores the survival strategies that can develop in response to complex trauma and how those strategies may continue to shape our lives long after the original experiences have passed.
The Link Between Sleep and Binge Eating: Why Rest Matters More Than You Think
Poor sleep can increase cravings, emotional eating, and vulnerability to binge eating by affecting hunger hormones, brain function, and emotional regulation. This article explores the connection between sleep and binge eating and offers practical ways to support better sleep and a healthier relationship with food.