How I Work With Individuals
Most people come to individual therapy because something isn’t working anymore. Maybe that something is internal: anxiety, low mood, a critical inner voice that won’t let up. Often it’s relational too. A pattern that keeps repeating with partners, family, or friends. A struggle to feel close to people. Difficulty being honest, or asking for what you need, or feeling safe. The internal and the relational are usually tangled together.
What I bring to the work is presence. We know that the single most important factor in therapy outcomes isn’t the technique used; it’s the relationship between client and therapist. I take that seriously. I don’t take notes during sessions. I try to speak less than my instinct tells me to. I aim to be the same person in the room that I am everywhere else: warm, curious, occasionally direct. The work we do together hinges on whether you can trust me enough to let me in.
I work from Carl Rogers’s premise that real change happens when a person feels deeply understood, accepted as they are, and met by someone genuinely themselves. Within that frame, I draw on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Existential approaches when they’re useful.
The acceptance part is a movement toward compassion. We didn’t wholly create our circumstances, and yet we often criticize ourselves as if we did. We resent our anxieties, our patterns, the ways we’ve been shaped by people and experiences we didn’t choose. But a perfect life is a high bar, and probably unattainable. So the work isn’t to fix you. The work is to help you live a good life that accepts the struggles you’ll inevitably face, with less self-blame and more room to choose what matters to you.
The relational dimension shows up in two ways: in what you bring to sessions, including your patterns, your relationships, the people in your life now and from your past; and in the relationship we build in the room itself. Both matter. Sometimes the most important moments are the ones where something shifts between us. Where you say something hard and I receive it, or where something I say lands wrong and we figure out together what happened. Those moments can help us move to another level.
Navigating Trauma and Overwhelm
When we go through something difficult or overwhelming, the body often holds onto it after the mind has tried to move on. This can leave you stuck in one of two states.
The first is hyper-arousal — anxiety, vigilance, the sense that the threat isn’t quite over. You’re always a little braced for something.
The second is hypo-arousal — numbness, shutdown, a flatness that makes everything feel far away. You’re functioning, but you’re not really here.
Both are the nervous system’s attempt to protect you, and both can settle. In our work together, we move slowly. We expand what therapists call your window of tolerance — the range in which you can feel difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them — so the past can begin to integrate rather than intrude.
This isn’t about reliving anything. It’s about building the capacity to revisit hard material without getting stuck in it.
Rewriting Your Inner Narrative
For many people, the harshest voice they hear all day is their own.
It might sound like constant low-grade self-criticism, replaying old mistakes, holding yourself to standards you’d never apply to anyone else, or assuming the worst about how others see you. Over time this voice can feel like the truth — just how things are.
The inner critic is almost always a protective strategy that served a purpose once upon a time, but has long since outgrown its usefulness. Somewhere along the way, being hard on yourself just became a default mode, often because of how the people around you treated themselves, or treated you, or both.
Rather than trying to silence this voice, we get curious about it. Where did it come from? What is it trying to protect? What would change if you stopped believing it?
The result, gradually, is a quieter mind — not because the voice disappears, but because you stop taking everything it says at face value.
What to Expect
The first session is mostly about getting to know each other. I’ll ask what’s bringing you in, what you’ve already tried, and what you’re hoping might shift. We won’t solve anything in 50 minutes — we’re just starting to build the relationship that the rest of the work depends on.
From there, the shape of our work depends on you. Some clients come for a focused piece of work and feel done in 8 to 12 sessions. Others stay longer, especially when there’s more history to explore. We check in regularly about whether the work is still useful, and at any point you’re free to say it isn’t.
The practical details:
- 50-minute sessions. This is the standard length for individual work.
- $160 per session. I don’t offer direct billing, but I provide receipts you can submit to your extended health plan — most plans in BC cover counselling with a Registered Clinical Counsellor.
- Weekly to start. Momentum matters early on. Many clients move to biweekly once the work is established.
- In-person or virtual. I work from my East Vancouver office and offer virtual sessions across BC. I prefer in-person when possible, but virtual is genuinely effective when that’s not practical.
