I came to therapy through a deep curiosity about what makes us human.

My professional life has moved through many different spaces—community mental health, residential settings, shelters, psychiatric environments, hospitals, psychotherapy, yoga, meditation and contemplative practice.

While these may seem like different worlds, I've come to see them as connected by one question:

What helps human beings feel safe enough to become more fully themselves?

I've spent 15+ years working alongside people navigating mental health challenges, trauma, relationships, addiction, loss, transition and some of life's most difficult circumstances. Over time, I've become increasingly interested not only in what people are experiencing, but in understanding the larger context that shaped those experiences.

I don't believe we can understand a person by looking only at the individual.

We are shaped by our biology and temperament, our earliest relationships, our families, our attachment experiences, our communities, our cultures and the larger social systems in which we live.

We carry our histories into our bodies and relationships. We learn ways of protecting ourselves. We learn what connection requires. We learn what parts of ourselves feel welcome—and what parts might need to be hidden.

These adaptations can be incredibly intelligent. And sometimes they become restrictive long after the circumstances that created them have changed.

I don't see people as problems to be fixed. I see people as having developed remarkably creative ways of navigating the worlds they were given. This doesn't mean every pattern is helpful now. It means that understanding the context of a pattern can create compassion—and compassion can create the space for change.

Rather than asking only “How do we get rid of this symptom?”, I am interested in questions such as:

• What is this response trying to do?
• What does it protect?
• What did it learn?
• What does it need now?
• And what becomes possible when we no longer have to organize our lives around it?

My work as a therapist has been deeply shaped by my experience supporting trauma survivors in the non-profit sector.

These experiences have taught me to pay attention to something that can easily get lost in traditional talk therapy: the experience of being a person in a body.

Our bodies communicate constantly through sensation, tension, movement, breath, impulses and shifts in activation. Learning to notice these experiences can offer another pathway toward understanding ourselves. This is one reason Somatic Experiencing® has become an important part of my therapeutic work.

I don't believe I am the expert on who you should become. You are the expert on your own lived experience.

My role is to bring clinical knowledge, curiosity, compassion, attunement and a willingness to sit alongside you as we explore what is happening.

• Sometimes therapy is about healing.
• Sometimes it is about grieving.
• Sometimes it is about learning boundaries.
• Sometimes it is about discovering that the identity you've carried for years no longer fits.
• Sometimes it is about finding yourself underneath everything you've learned you needed to be.

And sometimes it is simply about having another human being witness your experience without asking you to be anything other than who you are.

I don't promise transformation. I do believe in possibility.

I believe human beings have an extraordinary capacity for growth, adaptation and healing when the conditions support it.

My hope is that therapy becomes a place where you can develop a deeper relationship with yourself—one grounded in curiosity rather than judgment, connection rather than disconnection, and greater freedom rather than old patterns of protection.

Not becoming someone new. Becoming more fully yourself. And perhaps, eventually, feeling a little more at home in your own life.

• Registered Social Worker, Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers (OCSWSSW #830808)
• Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP)
• Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT 200)
• Certification in Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness
• Two-year training in Contemplative Therapy
• B.A., M.A., M.A. Counselling Psychology

My practice integrates Western neuroscience and psychology with Eastern contemplative philosophy.