My Approach
It is not required for clients to understand all of the acronyms therapists use - the acronyms are mostly helpful for other therapists who are looking to refer their clients to another practitioner. The only important acronym for clients is RCC, which stands for Registered Clinical Counsellor, which is important for checking if your insurance covers sessions with me.
For anyone who wants to know my style of therapy:
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I follow an AEDP model for talk therapy,
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as well as a psychodynamic perspective on thinking about patterns,
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I also do parts work, inspired by the IFS model
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My Approach
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We start slowly. I get to know you and your world. We chat about what things are like for you currently and we explore your hopes.
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I’m curious about your context (family upbringing, culture, friend groups, work/school environment, hobbies/interests).
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You will always be invited and encouraged to decline talking about an area you aren’t ready to explore.
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I check in with you about our therapeutic relationship. Therapy is all about fit, and it’s important that we discuss how you feel with me and our space, so we can foster honesty and openness in our connection. Plus, I view therapy as a practice space for hard and awkward conversations outside of the therapy room.
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I believe every type of coping you have had up to this moment (no matter how seemingly destructive it has felt) has served a useful purpose for you, and we will spend time exploring this, understanding the purposes, and slowly moving towards adding new ways of coping into the mix. I work from, and view all people, from a strength-based lens. I believe we are all just trying our best to look after ourselves.
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I view healing and wellness as a process, not a destination, and I will often normalize the desire for it to be a destination when those feelings come up in sessions.
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I incorporate techniques that are designed to help soothe your body and move you towards feeling regulated more often. It is normal and common that we find ourselves in therapy because our bodies are trying to tell us something through how we feel physically and most of us are not taught techniques to soothe ourselves when we feel tense, shut down, anxious, or overwhelmed
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How I view healing
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This is a quote from a fellow AEDP therapist that describes how she views healing and I couldn’t have said it better myself so I’ll share what she says to give you an idea of what therapy with me will be like:
“When we have experiences that are overwhelming to us, and we don’t have someone there to help us integrate the experience, make sense of it, or help us know it is over, it’s almost like it becomes locked in a place within us, like we have this preserved pathway within us that tells us the story that the danger is still happening; and when something in our adult lives happens that is similar enough to the details of that original hurt then all of a sudden we find ourselves reacting, and those reactions don’t necessarily happen in our thinking or what we are saying but often it will show up first in our bodies. And suddenly we don’t feel like we are adults in that moment; we are kind of 'back there' - we feel in our bodies like we are in that young neural network .
The good news is that our brains have plasticity, meaning that they can change, and in fact are wired to change and to heal. We just need some of the right ingredients to know that we are here in the present and not stuck back there, and that we are safe right now.
Therapy is a space to explore what is stuck, and to no longer be alone with it, and have someone guide you out of it, to let your body know the past experience is over, to let those stuck emotions finish the cycle in the presence of a caring figure. Therapy is helping people find who they are beneath their suffering.
We are wounded in relationships and we heal in relationships.
That is the power of therapy and the power of your innate ability to heal."
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