Counselling & Psychotherapy Approach
- Holistic: Our sessions can include awareness of the whole self, with both the mind, heart, body, and spirit (or deeper being).
Traditional approaches to counselling work with the mind and the heart. Through my own healing journey, I found most meaning and change by including awareness of the body and the soul/spirit/being together with the mind and the heart.My training and work experience include both traditional and body-based soul-centered approaches to counselling. I bring 17 years of work experience as a counsellor and psychotherapist, including past 8 years as a Counsellor with George Brown College's Counselling and Student Wellbeing Services.In our work together, I am committed to offering services that are:
- Client-Centered and Collaborative: supporting each person's innate wisdom and working together to facilitate positive change
- Compassionate: meeting the individual and their experiences with warmth, compassion and unconditional positive regard
- Strength-Based: seeing innate goodness, wholeness, strengths, gifts and abilities in people. Believing in and supporting their natural capacity for growth
- Trauma-informed
There are several Therapy Modalities to choose from in our sessions:Somatic or Body-based Counselling and Psychotherapy: In addition to speaking, you will have opportunities to include awareness of your experience in the body. I found through my personal inner work and by working with clients as a Counsellor for many years that embodied awareness can offer more opportunities for insight and transformation then speaking does alone.
Through my own journey of rediscovering my connection with my embodied wisdom over the past 25 years, I bring sensitivity and compassion with me as i work with clients to support them to gently rediscover their natural capacity to be more in touch with themselves.
- Mindfulness: Mindfulness allows us to be present with our experience in the present moment, non-judgmentally. This I find can be a wonderful tool for being more in touch with our experience with compassion, for noticing any habits or patterns we have, tapping into our inherent wholeness, and for cultivating a capacity to hear and choose responses that are more life-aligned. No prior experience with mindfulness or meditation is needed.
- Dance/Movement Therapy: The sessions can incorporate therapeutic movement/dance. Dance can be a powerful and very enjoyable way to express ourselves, to access the unconscious and the inner knowing, and to embody change we are seeking. Incorporating dance/movement can often lead to inner shifts faster then when practicing talk therapy alone.
No prior experience with dance or movement is needed. You choose how much dance/movement you would like to be included in the sessions. My aim is to go at the client's level of comfort. This might mean that for clients who are new to movement, we may speak most of the session and practice simple forms of meditation and embodiment at first. For clients who are more at ease with dance or wish to move more, we may incorporate more movement.
- Other forms of Expressive Arts such as visual arts can be included as well
- Traditional talk therapies including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Solution Focused Counselling, Narrative Therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy are available to be incorporated if desired
Languages: In addition to English, sessions can be available in Russian language.
I look forward to supporting you on your journey.
You are welcome to book a free 20-minute consultation to see if working together would be a good fit.
