Biography
I am a Licenced Counsellor (with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association). I have been a therapist now for several years working in Non-Profit agencies and obtained my graduate degree from Athabasca University. My undergraduate degree came from University of Manitoba, and I also briefly studied through Distance Education their Applied Counselling Certificate Program. I recognize that I come from a settler background and grew up in a farming community in rural South-East Manitoba. I had many opportunities growing up, including having a large religious community to lean on where I was already mentoring youth by the young age of sixteen. I recognize these privileges sometimes can influence the way my perception is influenced. Fortunately, I was also exposed to some First Nations communities growing up and got to experience many ongoing and intersecting connections with our First Nations people. This has influenced my lens and desire to protect the Indigenous paradigm.
My Practice
You deserve to know you, and to feel safe among others!
And I hope to co-create these conditions with you.
I am an Attachment-Informed, Mindfulness-based, E.M.D.R. therapist. I believe that we (somewhere early in our life) had adaptively processed our memories as children, and along the way we might have forgotten to update, inform, or treat our memory system to adapt to a more broad and current reality. And so, we remain stuck.
Transformation occurs when people find a way to reparent their inner selves in a compassionate and balanced way. I believe that grief-work, communication, and exposure are core fundamentals for any therapeutic success. And I believe that your brain is capable of healing it all. You can learn to hold space for uncomfortable sensations, emotions, and thoughts; to be present without giving into your urges to distort. I also believe that you can be present with your child’s discomforts, your partner’s discomforts, and even your community’s discomforts. Yes, you can bear it all.
That’s at least what I believe, but I am excited to get to know your thoughts about what kind of therapy experience you want to have.
I offer parent-child interaction play therapy, dyadic work using A.E.D.P., Narrative, and Compassionate Focused Therapy, trauma and memory reprocessing using M-CBT, E.M.D.R., A.R.T., and I.T.A.T.M. I am also trained as a Voice of the Child Reporter. My hope and goal for you is that I might also create a space that respects your capacity to heal, grow, trust, and learn to validate yourself within the presence of little-old-me.
