About Me
Before training as a therapist, I completed a PhD in Communication & Culture, with my doctoral research focusing on neonatal loss and mourning. After graduating, I worked as a qualitative researcher in a hospital-based setting, which gave me further opportunity to learn more about experiences with illness, recovery, and grief. I realized how drawn I was to sitting with people in their vulnerable moments and began to crave more relationship-based work than research offered.
Eventually, I realized the common threads tying together my various passions: I loved hearing people’s stories, noticing patterns and surfacing insights that help us understand ourselves and our world, building relationships and community, and valuing work that has potential to help in some way. I decided to retrain as a psychotherapist and from my very first session I knew I absolutely loved this work. Six years into my practice, I continue to appreciate the privilege of being a compassionate witness to each clients’ wounds and to their tremendous gifts.
In addition to my professional background, other meaningful life experiences inform my practice, including infertility, pregnancy losses, birth trauma, living with ADHD, parenting a wonderful child with ADHD, career changes, life transitions, grief, among others. I also feel my work as a therapist is coloured by my humour, creativity, curiosity, social consciousness, and endless fascination with the wild ride that is being human.
My Approach
I see therapy as a process to support self-discovery, healing, and resilience. In my practice, the heart of this therapeutic process is the relationship between client and therapist.
My aim is not to be the ‘expert,’ but to be a grounded and caring collaborator as clients explore patterns of thought, emotion, sensation, behaviour, and relationship with new awareness and, ultimately, new possibility for how they relate to themselves and to others.
I aim to be knowledgeable about various modalities, tools, techniques, etc. that might be helpful, while never losing site of the relationship between myself and my client as the foundation for any work they want to build within these frameworks. I commit myself to ongoing training, supervision, personal therapy, and anti-oppression education, as I believe safe and effective psychotherapy depends on therapists who continually work on building their own self-awareness and self-regulation.
I respect how hard it is to bring the most vulnerable parts of ourselves to another person and trust they will hold our struggles and strengths with compassion, curiosity, and competency. My hope is that our sessions create a space in which you can openly explore the experiences and questions that have brought you to therapy in a way that feel supported and insightful.
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Client-centered psychotherapy is at the core of my training and practice. What draws me to this approach is how it understands clients as having the wisdom needed for their own healing. This does not mean I am passive in our sessions; I am always happy to share my reflections or insights. However, it does mean my role is not to give advice or ‘fix,’ but to show up with authenticity and non-judgement to support your self-exploration and emotional processing.
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Traumatic events and relational traumas carry significant emotional, psychological, and physical impacts. My practice is informed by the teachings of Janina Fisher (PhD), which focus on internal safety and stabilization before moving into deeper emotional processing. As an approach, this can mean drawing on mindfulness and somatic techniques for nervous system regulation, as well as it promotes self-compassion, empowerment, and collaboration between me and my client.
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Although psychotherapy is deeply personal, practicing through an anti-oppressive lens means recognizing the ways real-world conditions and systems of power shape our outer and inner worlds. As an approach, this means working directly with the impacts of social exclusion, discrimination, systemic violence, exploitation, and intergenerational trauma in our work together. I also aim to continually build awareness around my own social identity and internalized beliefs and how they might impact the therapeutic relationship.
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I see therapy as an incredibly relational process that is supported by having therapists maintain high professional standards. I am regulated by the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO) and I adhere to their practice standards and regulations, including ethics, confidentiality, consent, and record-keeping. I also undertake ongoing training and supervision to continually build my competence and awareness of best practices and updated evidence in our field.
What to Expect
You can expect our sessions to be relational and conversational. I like to meet each client where they are at, to understand who they are, what is happening in their lives, what they value, and what they are hoping therapy can help them with. We will often return to certain themes or issues, but each session can be quite different depending on what you feel you want to work on at any time. We might be noticing patterns and creating insights that help make change. We might process memories, emotions, and sensations. We might cultivate somatic resources for nervous system stabilization. We might build understanding of how experiences and relationships shape who you are. We might be inviting reflection and setting a vision for your life. Therapy is beautifully complex, yet simple in its foundational reflection that we heal through relationship with self and others. Sometimes the process comforts us, sometimes it challenges us. My aim is to create a space grounded and reliable enough to work through anything that comes up along the way.
