My Journey​

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​My journey as a professional counsellor began in 2014 while working with youth in a residential setting, and my earliest experiences in the social service field came in 2009 when I volunteered at a support group for single parents, and in 2012 when I served as a Big Brother to students experiencing difficulties at home and in school. During University, I worked as a park technician (landscaping), security guard, and then warden. My interest in psychotherapy began after I began to work as a youth counsellor and gained experience creating behavioural plans and building supportive therapeutic relationships. I discovered my passion and patience while helping others cope with distress and navigate life transitions and harmful long-term survival strategies. I learned how difficult and unique each person's struggle is, and how powerful a safe connection can be while learning how to face life in a new way. All of my clients, coworkers, collaborators and amazing people in my life have influenced how I understand people and their meaningful connections with life. I enjoy knowing that I will continue to learn from everyone I engage with, and I hope to contribute to both new and old ways of understanding psychology and the practice of psychotherapy. If you have any questions, please reach out!

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My Approach​

 

​​Client Centered: This is the foundation of my approach. Its creator, Carl Rogers, believed that there are a few conditions that therapists can strive for that contribute greatly to therapeutic success and a client's personal development. These include unconditional acceptance, displays of empathetic understanding, and congruence with oneself (genuineness, speaking from the core emotion, openness, authenticity) from both parties so that whatever occurs in therapy can at the very least be a real experience. For this to happen, I also want to be seen without a mask, and so I include my in-the-moment experiences as pieces for us to to reflect on and learn from. 

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Psychodynamic: This term includes modalities that tracks our past experiences to explain present day survival strategies. I favour attachment theories like those of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. I also include Carl Jung in this camp. I believe Jung's frameworks mesh well with other modalities and I resonate with an understanding that we have an extremely wide and complicated array of aspects of ourselves, and in therapy we learn to realize which of these aspects we naturally lean towards, if others should be integrated more or less, and discover who we are beyond our ideal self and persona that helps us get through life.

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Holistic: A modality that I find to be a combination of Jungian and Compassion Focused Therapy is Internal Family Systems Therapy created by Richard Schwartz. Similar to Jung's view of the self-containing archetypes, Schwartz offers that we have protector parts which become activated under specific situations and lead us to thoughts, emotions and behaviours that keep us safe, even at the expense of our long-term well-being. You might think of these parts as inherited from our childhood (attachment lens), a feature of our evolution (Jungian lens), or simply as an intuitive way to grasp how our brain works in a prediction-response manner which biases information that we take in and quickly triggers familiar protective reactions. 

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Experiential: This means we pay attention to what emotions come up in session. We are not only deciphering the narrative. I am not interested in pulling you in a direction, I am more like a helpful sidekick who is curious about often (or for good reason) overlooked areas of yourself. 

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I think that a trustworthy relationship affords us a willingness to explore uncertain depths, learn to sit with difficult emotions or truths, and make sense of what they mean to both our unconscious self and our more integrated and realistic self. 

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Using these theories and methods, I hope to help you find and cultivate your sense of capability around internal experiences and have this lead to more confidence in your external life. Everyone's pathway to resilience is different, I seek to pull from my experiences of helping others, training, research and evidence, and your natural inclinations to help you walk down yours.