COUNSELLOR, CONFLICT CONSULTANT, ARTIST, MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATOR

I am a trained Mediator and artist, and have completed an MA in Conflict Resolution from the University of Haifa and an MA in Counselling Psychology from Yorkville University, and am a Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC).

My special interests lay at the intersections of reconciliation, trauma, and restorative justice, and I naturally explore these junctions through metaphor, story, spirituality, and identity formulation. My client-centered therapeutic approach is strengths-based, and aims to nurture cycles of distress into cycles of healing, helping clients feel as though they are empowered agents-of-change in their life adventure.

MY APPROACH

“The spontaneous movement in all of us is toward connection and health. No matter how withdrawn and isolating we have become, or how serious the trauma we have experienced, on the deepest level, just as a plant spontaneously moves towards the sun, there is in each of us an impulse moving toward connection.” Laurence Heller

We are all trying to make it work in a world that teaches isolation and independence, when we are wired for safe connection and secure dependence. The effects of this construct are devastating - tearing apart communities, relationships, and our sense of Self.

My work has centered in First Nation Communities across Canada, as well as in post-genocide communities in Rwanda. This focus on restoration and healing after societal trauma informs my approach to individual developmental trauma and complex PTSD in two main ways:

1. The recognition that we do not act and are not formed in isolation from our circumstances and history

2. The acknowledgement that no matter how deep our trauma, we are empowered, agents of change that with the right support can escape the cycle of victimhood and break free into an emboldened sense of Self.

My practice is largely focused on recognizing and integrating the competing parts of you that create tension, confusion, desperation, and exhaustion. Through a lens of reconciliation and nonjudgmental awareness, we learn to sit with, nurture, and understand the competing facets of your identity and the ways in which you’ve learned to survive, be they unmet needs, shame-identifications, distressing thought patterns, or self-rejection. By learning how to manage and relate to your tensions, we’ll understand how we can use the intel of our nervous system to move from cycles of distress and crisis to cycles of healing and freedom.