My Approach to Therapy
Therapy is about making a connection with someone who sees you, hears you and understands where you are in your life. I create a safe space for you to explore your authentic self, understand how your life has been shaped by your experiences and help you move towards healing and creating safety and authenticity in your life. This is a space to grow, develop new skills using evidence-based approaches and to redefine who you are in this moment.
Your Therapist Session
How I Support You In Therapy
You deserve to feel seen, safe, and understood
You are not a problem to be fixed. At the heart of my work is the belief that we heal in environments where we are met with compassion, curiosity and respect. Having someone to help you step outside of the chaos and stress can help you clearly see a path forward while also seeing our past and present from a different perspective.
Your experiences shaped you, but they do not define you.
Our family, culture, and the society we grew up in shaped us as we grew. We developed patterns and coping skills that help us manage from day to day, but sometimes we can get stuck, which can cause us distress. We can be weighed down by stress, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, addictions or burnout. By exploring our past learning and understanding how events shaped our lives, we can begin to see a path forward with learned skills and new knowledge of how we can begin to live authentically.
Therapy should respect your pace, autonomy, and lived wisdom.
You are the expert in your life and your experiences. We will work together to explore your lived experience, insight, history and resilience. We will build on those using my clinical training and insights to help you redefine who you are.
Authenticity is a form of healing
We all hold a vision of who we are at our core. When that vision is different from our reality it can create distress for us. When we begin to honour our true selves and start to work towards creating a life that matches what we envision for ourselves, we will often begin to see a reduction in the level of distress that drove us to seek out therapy to begin with. Many people spend years masking, adapting, and surviving. Therapy can be a place to reconnect with the parts of yourself that have been overlooked, silenced, or misunderstood. I believe in creating a space where you can explore who you are beneath the expectations, pressures, and protective layers.
Your counselling
What Our Work Feels Like
Healing is possible — and it doesn’t require perfection
Healing from trauma can be hard work. Like anything worth doing, it involves trial and error as we learn new skills. There will be setbacks, there will be growth, and there will be times when we feel pain or grief we thought we had left behind. Uncovering who we are at our core and changing things in our lives can be hard work. Moving towards prioritizing your own needs and allowing guilt to fall away can feel like an uphill battle. My role is to support you as you untangle what hurts, reclaim what’s yours, and move towards a life that feels honest and whole.
Trauma-Informed, Always
Feeling safe in the therapeutic space is very important. Here you are trusting me to support you in a caring way while you are being vulnerable, I do not take that trust lightly. I work gently, collaboratively, and at your pace — never pushing, never rushing. I try to check in with you frequently to ensure that you are feeling safe, that your boundaries are respected and we are moving at a pace that you are happy with. My role is to create a space where your nervous system can finally exhale.
Compassion Over Judgment
We are our own worst critics, with those little voices that remind us of the mistakes that we have made, that remind us that we are undeserving of the compassion and care of others. Building self-compassion is an important part of the work that we do. Instead of pathologizing, I help you understand the “why” behind your experiences so you can move forward with clarity and self-compassion.
Rooted in Lived Experience and Clinical Training
My work blends professional education and expertise with the insight that comes from navigating trauma, caregiving, military family life, and the long process of reclaiming my own voice. This combination allows me to meet you with both skill and genuine understanding.
Collaborative and Client‑Led
You are the expert on your life. I bring tools from a number of therapeutic approaches but we decide together what works and what does not. Therapy is a partnership in walking your journey and understanding where you are in that journey. No one therapeutic treatment works for everyone.
Balanced Life Therapy
Affirming of Neurodivergence and Identity
I work from a neurodiversity-affirming lens, honouring the ways that ADHD, autism, and masking shape a person’s inner world. I support those who have spent years being “the strong one,” the caretaker, or the one who holds everything together, often at great personal cost.
Focused on Authenticity and Integration
Healing isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about reconnecting with the parts of yourself that were silenced, overlooked, or pushed aside. Together, we explore what feels true for you now and how to build a life that reflects your values, needs, and identity.
online counselling
Video Consultation
The most important part of choosing a therapist is feeling a connection with them. It is part of my practice to offer a consult session so we can meet informally to discuss your immediate needs, but to also ensure that you feel safe sharing the most inner details of your life with me. If you present with an issue that I do not have experience in, I can potentially refer you to a therapist who does.
This is a space where you can share what brings you to therapy, ask questions about my experience and approach and to also get a sense of who I am as a therapist.
Currently I only offer video and telephone counselling. I maintain a small case load to ensure that I can provide consistent and high-quality care to my clients while also looking after my own needs. I offer a reduced rate for those in need, so this does impact my ability to rent out an in-person therapy space. This allows you to access support from the comfort of your own home, with flexibility and privacy.
There’s no expectation to commit. My goal is simply to help you feel informed, supported, and empowered to choose the therapist who feels right for you — even if that isn’t me.
Sliding Scale, Payments, and Insurance
A regular session is 50 minutes long and my current rate is $160/hr.
I am currently working on putting direct billing in place.
Many insurance companies will accept a receipt for a "counsellor or therapist" that is certified by a regulatory body such as the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA). Please check your extended benefits for more information.
If you are facing financial hardship, please contact me. I take on a limited number of sliding-scale clients.
FAQ
What are Common Therapy Approaches?
Every year, we hear about new therapy models or breakthrough treatments to help people heal or recover from their life experiences, like it’s the new miracle treatment.
As with all science, they all have common roots in some of the original therapeutic approaches. Over time, they have been tested and improved upon, repackaged and renamed but most have very common origins. Some common ones that you might be familiar with:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Helps to identify unhelpful or unhealthy thought patterns.
Psychodynamic Therapy: Helps us to identify how our unconscious and early life experiences shape our existing experience of life.
Behavioral Therapy: Helps us understand how our behavior was shaped by outside forces as we grew up.
Humanistic Therapy: Focuses on growth, accepting and understanding the self through personal development.
Integrative Therapy: Combines all of the above approaches based on the clients needs.
What is the difference between an anxiety attack, panic attack and a melt down?
Anxiety attacks are a result of intense feelings of anxiety that build over time, usually it is tied to an ongoing stressor or worry. It can include feelings of fear, dread and worry driven by negative or intrusive thoughts.
Panic attacks come on as a sudden, intense surge of fear and the feeling that you may be dying. Your fight/flight/freeze response activates intensely which can cause chest pain, rapid heart rate, sweating, nausea and feeling detached from reality.
Melt downs are more common among neurodivergent individuals and are often confused with panic or anxiety attacks. These are not fear or worry based but from sensory overwhelm. They can often be driven by sensory overload, difficulty in communicating, increased stressors and sudden changes in routine.
Top stressors in life
Life happens, and sometimes we need more support when stressful events occur.
Some of these include the loss of a partner or child. Loss of a job. Moving. Physical injury, chronic or severe illness. Divorce or separation. Financial problems. Major life transitions such as the birth of a child, retiring from work or becoming an empty nester.
These stressors added onto our every day annoyances can become overwhelming and can prevent us from effective problem solving
Adverse Childhood Events
Clinical research has proven that adverse childhood events damage a child’s sense of stability, safety and care, which can shape how they approach life. The more events that a child experiences, the more likely they are to develop mental health issues, chronic illnesses, substance abuse and relationship issues.
Some of these early childhood events can include physical or emotional abuse, food insecurity, a parent going to jail, divorce, and many more.
