SESSION INFORMATION
Flexible Schedule
Available for clients across Canada
Flexible Payment
If cost is a barrier, we can discuss therapy options that will suit your budget. I offer sliding scale fees – apply if you may be eligible.
E-transfers and all credit cards are accepted for payment.
Language
English
Evidence-based therapeutic techniques
I use tools from a variety of modalities to gear my approach to each client.
Acceptance and Commitment (ACT)
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an action-oriented approach that stems from traditional behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy.
Clients learn to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with their inner emotions and, instead, accept that these deeper feelings are appropriate responses to certain situations that should not prevent them from moving forward in their lives. With this understanding, clients begin to accept their hardships and commit to making necessary changes in their behavior, regardless of what is going on in their lives and how they feel about it.
Art Therapy
It may look like a craft class, but art therapy is a serious technique that uses the creative process to help improve the mental health of clients.
Art therapy can be used on children and adults to treat a wide range of emotional issues, including anxiety, depression, family and relationship problems, abuse and domestic violence, and trauma and loss. Commonly found in hospitals and community centres, art therapy programs are based on the belief that the creative process is healing and life-enhancing. As they paint or draw, a skilled therapist can use the client’s works of art and their approach to the process as springboards to help them gain personal insight, improve their judgment, cope with stress, and work through traumatic experiences.
Attachment-based
Attachment-based therapy is form of therapy that applies to interventions or approaches based on attachment theory, which explains how the relationship a parent has with its child influences development.
Coaching
Life coaching is an increasingly popular profession that has no specific licensing or academic requirements. Though psychologists also often consider themselves life coaches, these therapists don’t focus on treating mental illness. Instead, they help individuals realize their goals in work and in life. An executive coach, for example, may be enlisted to help a chief executive become a better manager, while a “love” coach may map out a plan to help a client find romantic fulfillment.
Compassion Focused
Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) may assist individuals who struggle with mood disorders, anxiety, or feelings of shame and self-criticism, often stemming from early experiences of abuse or neglect.
Through exercises like role-playing, visualization, meditation, and activities that promote gratitude for everyday life, CFT teaches clients about the mind-body connection and guides them in practicing awareness of their thoughts and bodily sensations. This helps clients cultivate self-compassion and compassion for others, which can help regulate their emotions and foster a sense of safety, self-acceptance, and comfort.
Culturally Sensitive
Culturally sensitive therapists provide therapy that is culturally sensitive. They understand that people from different backgrounds have different values, practices, and beliefs, and are sensitive to those differences when working with individuals and families in therapy.
Dialectical Behavior (DBT)
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is the treatment most closely associated with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Therapists practice DBT in both individual and group sessions.
The therapy combines elements of CBT to help with regulating emotion through distress tolerance and mindfulness. The goal of Dialectical Behavior Therapy is to alleviate the intense emotional pain associated with BPD.
Feminist
Feminist therapy is an integrative approach to psychotherapy that focuses on gender and the particular challenges and stressors that women face as a result of bias, stereotyping, oppression, discrimination, and other factors that threaten their mental health.
The therapeutic relationship, based on an authentic connection and equality between the therapist and the client, helps empower clients understand the social factors that contribute to their issues, discover and claim their unique identity, and build on personal strengths to better their own lives and that of others.
Gottman Method
The Gottman Theory For Making Relationships Work shows that to make a relationship last, couples must become better friends, learn to manage conflict, and create ways to support each other’s hopes for the future. Drs. John and Julie Gottman have shown how couples can accomplish this by paying attention to what they call the Sound Relationship House, or the seven components of healthy relationships.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness therapy is a form of talk therapy that aims to enhance self-awareness, promote emotional regulation, reduce stress, and encourage the acceptance of experiences without judgment. It involves becoming more aware of thoughts, feelings, emotions, surroundings, and situations, and reducing automatic responses.
Somatic
Somatic (from the Greek word ‘somat’, meaning body) psychotherapy bridges the mind-body dichotomy recognizing that emotion, behaviour, sensation, impulse, energy, action, gesture, meaning and language all originate in physical experiences. Thinking is not an abstract function but motivates, or is motivated by, physical expression and action.
A somatic approach to trauma treatment can be effective by examining how past traumatic experiences cause physical symptoms (e.g. bodily anesthesia or motor inhibitions) which in turn affect emotion regulation, cognition and daily functioning.
Dance therapy reflects a somatic approach.
Strength-Based
Strength-based therapy is a type of positive psychotherapy and counselling that focuses more on your internal strengths and resourcefulness, and less on weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings. This focus sets up a positive mindset that helps you build on you best qualities, find your strengths, improve resilience and change worldview to one that is more positive. A positive attitude, in turn, can help your expectations of yourself and others become more reasonable.
Transpersonal
Transpersonal therapy emphasizes the transcendent or spiritual aspects of a client’s development. A transpersonal therapist may help the client cultivate a greater sense of connectedness with others, with nature, and with a higher spirit.
Trauma Focused
Trauma focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) helps people who may be experiencing post-traumatic stress after a traumatic event to return to a healthy state.