Journey to psychotherapy and my approach
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. My journey as a professional counsellor began in 2014 while working with youth and young adults in a residential setting. During University, I worked as a park technician (landscaping), security guard, and then park warden. My interest in psychotherapy began while counselling youth as a part of a crisis and stabilization team. I worked with first responders, sat in on various kinds of counselling sessions, and gained experience working on teams designing behavioural care plans and building supportive relationships. My interest and passion for helping others cope with distress, navigate major life disruptions, and avoid harmful relationship patterns continued to grow. I learned how difficult and unique each person's struggle is, and how powerful a trustworthy and confidential connection can be. While completing my Master of Arts, I worked as an Educational Assistant supporting students with various mental health and behavioural issues. While doing so, I was again reminded of the unique story and needs of the individual, but also how a common foundation of unconditional acceptance and consistency can build trust and a pathway to getting out of our safe, but long-term stagnating, comfort zones. All of my clients, coworkers, collaborators, family, and even brief relationships have influenced how I understand people and their meaningful connections to life and themselves. 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 people and practicing psychotherapy.
My Approach
Client-centred: 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 can lead to positive growth. For this to happen, I also want to be seen without a mask, so if I find it useful in the moment, I may include my experiences as pieces for us to reflect on.
Psychodynamic: This term includes modalities that track our past experiences to explain present-day survival strategies and the dynamic forces or drives that contribute to our dynamic minds. I favour attachment theorists like those of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. I also find knowledge from Carl Jung useful as his 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. In therapy, we can learn to recognize which of these aspects we naturally lean towards, and which we may benefit from integrating.
Internal Family Systems: 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 how we contain archetypes (shared patterns of thought, behaviour), Schwartz suggests 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 functions in a prediction-response manner. Which is to say, we naturally filter or have a bias connected to the information that we take in so that we can quickly activate familiar protective reactions, not necessarily value-driven or long-term oriented reactions.
Experiential: This means we pay attention to what emotions come up in session. We are not always deciphering the narrative in a cognitive, logical manner, but learning from the emotion as it arises. I've found that a trustworthy relationship affords a willingness to explore and feel what lies in the uncertain depths, trains our ability to tolerate difficult emotions, and makes sense of what they mean, so our more logical and conscious self can have a greater effect on our reactive unconscious.
"The only way to change an emotion is with a stronger and opposing emotion.” -Les Greenberg
"Name it to tame it, feel it to heal it" -Dan Siegel
"Think of emotions as being released in order. If the order cannot be completed, the emotional learning we need to move on, to be safe in the face of the trigger and desensitize from it, does not happen. If the scary emotions are not soothed, they stay stuck, ready to be retriggered to protect us. Soothe through compassionate understanding; start by being curious about yourself." -Tori Olds
"Language helps us stay regulated. Saying things and writing them down puts them into the world, and once there, our minds can interact with them in a new way. Getting things into the world allows us to evaluate them, think about how we change our minds when we say something out loud. Curiosity and descriptions of an experience change our relationship with it. Curiosity requires openness; openness is a step towards greater realization, integration, wider perspective, and change." -Tori Olds
I chose the name Pathways to Resilience because meaningful change rarely follows a direct route. Together, we can create new pathways for understanding, emotional tolerance, and growth using a common-sense, non-judgmental, and evidence-based approach.