Individuals
Trauma
Trauma is anything that happens for too long, too fast, or is too much and without our consent (adapted from Dr. Peter Levine). You experience trauma when your ability to effectively respond to your life is outweighed by the magnitude of the events that have happened to you.
Working through trauma has many facets but one that can surprise people is that it is important to honour and acknowledge our survival, and to reconnect to our purpose and joy. Together we can find ways to understand the legacy of trauma and learn to engage with it and life with spacioiusness and choice.
Family of Origin
Nobody gets through childhood unscathed. Sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, you have been left with some complicated feelings about family and what it means to be loved. These feelings can leave a lasting residue that can interfere with your ability to freely and fully engage in life and relationships with your whole heart.
I will help support you in recognizing and understanding your template for engaging in the world that was informed by your early life experiences—both good and hard. I will help you slow down and get curious about the stories and the blanks your mind fills in when you are unsure or anxious about something. I will listen for and honour your survival and your innate capacities. I will help you organize your experiences so that they feel like integrated parts of yourself as opposed to chaotic, stressful things to be avoided.
Interpersonal Relationships
We are our most vulnerable selves in relationships and it can be hard to manage that vulnerability. Challenges can show up in our partnerships, friendships, family, and relationships with coworkers. We can feel like we don’t know how to ask for what we need or how to relax into the connections that are available to us. Patterns repeat themselves.
Our work together can help you see and understand how relationships operate in your life. We will identify the ways you consciously and unconsciously manage connection. Therapy can help you set, clarify, and work on your boundaries in relationships, and to discover a vocabulary for asking for your needs to be met. It is also possible that in the exploration of your relationships, you may decide that some of them need to come to an end. Our work can help support the difficult feelings that arise when a relationship is over. Together we will find ways to integrate these emotional scars.
Anxiety
Anxiety can leave us feeling like something is wrong in our bodies. Our stomachs churn and limbs ache with the feeling that something terrible is about to happen. Some of us try to cope with this discomfort by getting busy, over working, or becoming perfectionists. Others of us cope by feeling paralyzed and with no direction to turn.
Psychotherapy can help through developing a deeper understanding of how anxiety operates in your life. Together we can engage with both the somatic and psychological responses to the feeling of threat in your life. This work can highlight some of the ways that you take care of yourself, and can contribute to your resilience. It can also shine a light on things that we do unintentionally that can contribute to us feeling stuck and out of control.
Depression
When depression visits, you can feel overwhelmed and like the spark has been taken out of life. Often times even the simplest things are too much. Commonly we don’t understand why depression has come, but there are often underlying causes which require our attention and care.
Psychotherapy can help in the work of stabilizing symptoms and bringing back your sense of aliveness and possibility to life. It can also assist in understanding and attending to the ways that depression takes shape. Depression contains wisdom and important information about your hurts and sense of helplessness. Our work together can help contain, integrate, and organize our experience.
Thesis/Project Doula
You’ve been here before. You’ve been working on this issue/problem/thesis/proposal/etc for far too long now and you just don’t know how to get any further.
I can help you find new ways of engaging with the internal road blocks you are facing so that you can move through this place of ‘stuckness’ and reconnect with your creative and fully-alive self.
Identity
Your identity is complex and intricate. It deserves to be expressed and accepted. Our culture and society can leave people feeling disconnected from their most essential selves.
Society forces individuals to keep a parts of themselves hidden or tells them that they are unwelcome. You deserve to be seen as you are and who you are, regardless of race, gender expression, sexual orientation, or ability.
I am here to support and witness you in the exploration and expression of your identity. I am here to help you connect with your anger and your agency. You may have experienced trauma and have felt unwanted or unwelcome in the world. My aim is to cultivate a liberation space to foster the full embodiment of who you truly are.
Chronic Illness
Having a chronic illness can be a truly overwhelming and harrowing experience. You can feel like your body has betrayed you and that the medical system has too. You’re sick tired of feeling sick and tired, and you may simultaneously want and hate the next specialist appointment. You might be tired of talking about everything with people who just want to fix it or need you to be OK —whatever that means.
I am here to listen and to co-create space where you can feel OK, or even great not being OK. I will support you in recognizing the ableism that exists everywhere, and honouring that you are more than an illness or a label.
Should accessibility be a barrier for receiving support, I am happy to connect over Doxy, a stable video conferencing platform, so we can meet in whichever way works for you.
Life Transitions
Life is full of transitions. Some of them you move through with ease and others require extra care and attention. Often starting something new will require additional support. A new job, relationship, embodying a new part of your identity, a project, or home are all circumstances which people find particularly challenging. You might have a narrative in your mind that says new things are fun and exciting. So when a new life event brings with it anxiety and exhaustion, you might be harsh with yourself for not being positive. Lets face it. Novelty is both beautiful and interesting while also being difficult and exhausting. Finding a new rhythm and attending to all of the big and small changes with transition is worthy of a witness and a guide to support your capacity to fully experience all of the various details and dimensions.
It is also true that saying good-bye or having something come to a close comes with it a complex series of emotions. Saying good-bye to a job, place, friendship, role, or intimate relationship can bring us into contact with one of life’s greatest dilemmas; how do we stay in connection while also needing to disconnect? Sometimes disconnecting doesn’t feel like its our choice. Sometimes disconnecting feels like the only choice. Regardless, our stuff gets churned up during these times and you are worthy of having someone there to support you, to help you notice the pieces you may have lost sight of and to be there as you integrate these different dimensions into your life.
Couples
The spark isn’t there like it used to be and despite being together you can’t help but feel alone. You love each other but something is really not working.
You want to become an amazing steward of your relationship but you don’t know how. You believe in justice and fairness but somehow that doesn’t translate the way you want it to in your partnership.
I can help you uncover how and why things escalate. I can assist you in understanding this cycle of disconnection you’re stuck in and help you find ways to come back to each other. Our work together can help you foster a sense of safety and security and reconnect with the love you share.
Some couples come in when they are in a relatively good and solid space, with the desire to work on deepening and expanding their connection.
This style of therapy is particularly helpful with premarital or pre-cohabitation transitions. The goal of this kind of counselling is to ensure you’ve had the hard conversations that are worthy of your attention when making an important commitment to another. It can also be a safe guard for potential future problems and will offer strategies and intervention for how to manage the hard stuff that will inevitably come up.
Therapists
Being a therapist can be destabilizing. You’re meta-processing yourself all. of. the. time. All of your family of origin wounds, and those of your clients, won’t stop playing in your mind. All the while you’re trying to feel competent, self-regulated and effective. I know. It’s a lot. I have been there.
You probably have all kinds of supports in your life - colleagues, supervisors, consultants - but its possible you can’t be fully vulnerable with them. Its hard to speak up and say that you’ve overwhelmed when you are simultaneously expecting yourself to have all of your shit together.
We all struggle. It’s what makes us human. As professionals it can feel so shaming to need support. As someone who has truly been there, let me help. It will get easier, I promise.
I offer psychotherapy, consultation and supervision to therapists in the community. Please let me know if you are working towards your certification as an independent practitioner for CRPO.