Moira Ann DaltonCreative Arts Therapist, Dance/Movement Therapist

Anxiety can mean nervousness, worry, or self-doubt. Anxiety disorder is a mental health disorder that entails excessive, repeated bouts of worry, anxiety, and/or fear.

Adolescent mental health focuses on adolescent-specific experiences including physical and cognitive development, social and environmental factors, sex, sexual identification and orientation, emotional processing, and substance use. Given the influence that parents/guardians have on adolescents, home life is a particularly important consideration.

Children that experience parents and/or guardians that are avoidant, ambivalent, or resistant from an early age, may develop attachment issues. This can manifest as difficulty forming or maintaining friendships, romantic relationships and empathetic bonds throughout life, as well as other issues.

Trauma is the result of experiencing a perceived, extremely distressful event. Although the stress threshold for each person differs, meaning that each person considers and experiences trauma differently, it is an event that tops one’s threshold. It exceeds one’s ability to cope or emotionally process. Symptoms may include shock, anxiety, confusion, hopelessness, feeling disconnected, mood swings, nightmares, and intrusive thoughts.

Coping skills are tools and techniques one can learn, practice, and use to handle difficult emotions, decrease stress, and establish or maintain a sense of internal order.

Depression often causes people to feel sad, empty, or hopeless, and can cause a lack of interest in life. It can also affect a person's thinking patterns and physical health.

Refers relationship issues with a partner or spouse. Can include issues related to relationship distress, relationship satisfaction, communication, intimacy, etc.

Self-esteem is the degree to which a person feels confident, valuable, and worthy of respect. Feeling low self-esteem can influence overall well-being and be linked to anxiety and/or depression.

Social anxiety or social phobia is fear of social situations or a fear of interacting with people other than close friends and family. Social anxiety can be persistent, intense, and debilitating, greatly affecting daily life.

Abuse includes any significant mistreatment along the lines of psychical, emotional, sexual, verbal, and neglect. Survivors of abuse may experience negative thoughts and feelings, flashbacks, distrust of others, social withdrawal, self-harm, and increased likelihood of developing mental health and substance abuse issues.