In a session with me, especially early on, you’ll be invited to use art-making and/or conversation to help me learn about you so we can co-create supportive structure. I’ll ask questions about your experiences, feelings, thoughts, and behaviours.
Depending on what you bring to a session, we might explore:
- How your experiences, feelings, thoughts, and/or behaviours connect to each other?
- How do they show up throughout your day, or in your body? What feels difficult about them? What feels supportive?
- How can we hold them with care and tend to them?
- How might you want to shift them to support your ability to be in relationship with yourself and others?
If you like, I can support you in connecting with new information and perspectives
- internally, through art-making, conversation, and curiosity
- externally, through supportive resources, community connections, and psychoeducation
Read below for more details on my approach:
Children, teen, or adult – people have so much knowledge about healing and growth, just through living our unique lives. I centre and draw out that knowledge in my therapy sessions by asking questions about your lived experience, and encouraging my clients to take the lead on exploring the art supplies available to them.
If you want psychoeducation tips or an art therapy directive, I am happy to offer those – but anything I offer is with your consent and with the encouragement to say “no,” at any point.
Building a therapeutic relationship and opening up to someone can take time. Healing and processing difficult experiences and feelings can take time. Short-term therapy is always an option, and we can make great strides in a short time. We will move at the pace you set for us, but I will invite slowness into the room when possible.
Creating is a human need. In creating, we can learn about ourselves and others, our relationship to self, community, and the world around us. By creating, we can also just have fun, zone out, tune in, relax, or get energized. I will invite art-making into sessions if that interests you, whether the art is visual, musical, written or spoken. Therapy and art overlap as forms of story-telling.
I personally find searching for and celebrating the magic, mysteries, and playfulness in life and the world around us to be a nourishing point of healing. If it connects with my clients, I may invite these into the room for us to work with.
I like to ask questions! I want to know more about my clients and the ways they experience the world around them, but, as above, always with their consent. If you don’t want to answer a question, just say so. I welcome both conversation and quiet.
Sometimes we need to sit in silence, sometimes we need the right question asked, and sometimes we need someone to hear and respect our “no, not right now,” – my role is to provide whichever one suits you.
I try to support clients in building a sense of personal control in their lives, even in small ways, while recognizing and resisting the ways systemic oppression impacts our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being.
Sometimes we need therapy, and sometimes we actually need community, housing, food, financial stability – I work to provide the unique support needed to each client, including connecting them to referrals, resources, and communities that better match their circumstances and goals.
The way therapy functions is inherently colonial, capitalistic, and coercive, this includes my role as a qualifying therapist. In this role, I work to be an advocate against violent colonial systems, and in favor of consensual systems of care.
We all make mistakes, we can all cause harm, and we can all experience harm. And each day we can also be someone new. We should be accountable to our mistakes, learn from them, even forgive ourselves for them, but we are not defined by our mistakes.
Understanding people (including myself) as new each day centers non-disposability, the belief that each of us is valuable regardless of our mistakes. I try ensure our therapy sessions are a space for honesty without fear of judgment or repercussion.