Counselling in Squamish & Online Therapy Across BC
Free Anxiety Course | Squamish BC
You Gotta Name It to Tame It
A Free 5-Lesson Online Course for anxiety, overthinking, and understanding your emotions
Does this sound familiar?
Your mind won’t quiet down. Thoughts spiral. You feel overwhelmed but can’t quite put your finger on why. People tell you to “just relax” — and somehow that makes it worse.
You’re not broken. You’re just missing a few skills that nobody taught you.
What if anxiety wasn’t something to fight — but something to understand?
Neuroscience research shows that the first step to shifting anxiety isn’t calming down — it’s getting clear. As psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dan Siegel puts it: “You gotta name it to tame it.”
When you learn to identify what’s actually happening inside you — your thoughts, your emotions, your body sensations — your internal world starts to feel less overwhelming and more navigable. And from that clearer place, you can begin to choose how you respond, instead of just reacting.
This is exactly what this course teaches you to do.
Where these skills come from
The skills in this course are drawn from Focusing — a body-centred approach developed by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, and further developed by Ann Weiser Cornell whose work I draw on directly in this course.
Gendlin spent years studying what actually makes therapy work — what distinguishes the people who shift from the ones who stay stuck. What he found was that the clients who did best weren’t necessarily the ones who had the most insight or talked the most. They were the ones who could pay attention to their inner experience in a particular way — slower, more curious, more connected to what was happening in the body rather than just the mind.
He called this the felt sense — the subtle, not-quite-articulated physical sense of something that lives in the body before it has words. The tightness in the chest before a difficult conversation. The heaviness that settles in on Sunday evenings. The restlessness that shows up and won’t quite explain itself.
Focusing is a way of learning to listen to those signals — not to be swept away by them, but to get curious about what they’re actually telling you.
That’s the heart of this course. Not managing anxiety from the outside — but developing a different relationship with your inner experience from the inside.
What you’ll learn
Over five lessons you’ll build the core skills that research shows make a real difference in working with anxiety:
- How to tell the difference between a thought and a feeling — mixing them up is one of the most common reasons anxiety stays stuck.
- How to identify what’s happening in your body — and why the body is often holding information that the thinking mind can’t access on its own.
- How to work with the felt sense — learning to turn toward your inner experience with curiosity rather than urgency, and what becomes possible when you do.
- How to create more internal space without suppressing or avoiding what you’re feeling — because pushing anxiety away tends to make it push back harder.
- How to respond to yourself with more compassion and less judgment — which turns out to be one of the most practically useful things you can develop for anxiety management.
- How to interrupt the anxiety cycle before it takes over — not by fighting the anxiety, but by understanding what it’s actually about.
Each lesson includes a clear explanation of the skill, real-life examples you’ll recognise yourself in, and practical experiments to try between sessions — so this becomes something you actually use rather than just something you read.
This course is for you if:
Your thoughts race and you can’t seem to slow them down. You feel overwhelmed or anxious and aren’t sure exactly why. You’re hard on yourself and wish you could ease up. You’ve tried “just relaxing” — and it hasn’t worked. You want practical tools grounded in real research, not generic advice. You’re curious about what your body might be telling you that your mind hasn’t figured out yet.
What’s included
✓ 5 written lessons available at your own pace
✓ A companion workbook with guided exercises
✓ Practical experiments to try between each lesson
✓ Direct access to Jill by email if you have questions
Already working with a therapist? This course works beautifully alongside individual counselling — particularly if you’re working with somatic or body-based approaches.
A note from Jill
I’ve been using Focusing in my counselling practice for years — both as a practitioner and as someone who has experienced it from the inside. It’s one of the approaches I return to most consistently because it works with the whole person rather than just the thinking layer.
This course is my attempt to make the foundational skills of Focusing accessible to anyone — not just people in therapy. You don’t need any background in it. You just need some curiosity about your own inner experience and a willingness to experiment.
Reading about these skills is a good start. The real shift happens when you begin to try them. I’ll be with you each step of the way — if something isn’t clicking or you have questions, I’m just an email away.
— Jill Koehler, RCC | Communicating Well