My Approach to Therapy

Registered Clinical Counsellor #16546.

As you go along in life, do you find yourself switching between different moods and hijacked by so many contradictory feelings and impulses that feel out of your control or conscious awareness? You may wish to live life more fully and meaningfully while you find yourself inhibited or limited with struggles between your wish for involvement in ordinary life and fear of leaving the house, mistrust of relationships, or hopelessness about the future. In dealing with these personal challenges, you may feel flooded and severely anxious, or in trying to disconnect or deny these responses, you may end up feeling chronically depressed and alienated from yourself.

At the heart of my work is the firm belief that despite these common challenges we are all hard-wired with a desire for healing and growth.  In creating a safe and engaging therapeutic relationship with you, I simply become a catalyst for such exploration and change.

My true passion is then to help you become mindful of your trauma-driven emotional, somatic, and behavioural patterns while working with you to undo the still present barring effects of past traumas on your daily life.

This will allow you to move forward with vitality and empowerment in life and a clear sense of connection to your whole self and others. What emerges as a result of these profound neurobiological transformations is a state of calm, flow, connection, ease, confidence, and self-compassion.

My Focus:

I work with clients who present with different issues, including depression, anxiety, relationship challenges, and toxic shame. The focus of my work and my specialty is however in helping clients with childhood traumas or complex trauma as I believe the root cause of losing the vital and authentic self within us. I think there is so much vitality and engagement when we connect with our core emotions and live our authentic self, however, childhood traumas and past experiences with our caregivers can lead to shutting down of parts of our true self that were not accepted by the people we needed the most as children. Dissociating from our trauma experiences and shutting down the emotions that followed them function as a coping strategy for survival especially in the early years, while these earlier strategies can limit our connection to our true, peaceful, and uncritical self and our joyful engagement with life, in later years.

Modality Orientation:

I believe each client is unique and each client has her or his concerns and needs. It is because of this uniqueness that I approach every session from several therapeutic approaches to meet the best interest of my clients. However, I have specialized training in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), a healing-oriented, attachment-based, affectively-focused mind/body mindfulness treatment that puts neuroscience and positive neuroplasticity into clinical action. I am also trained in other modalities including Internal Family Systems, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Interpersonal Neurobiology.

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