Therapy (-ish)

Coaching, Counselling & Therapy-ish

Coaching vs. Counselling

If you’re here for general mental health counselling, welcome! If you’re here for goal and action-oriented coaching, I do that as well. Coaching and counselling have many overlaps including emotional processing, reflection & inquiry, and exploration of new possibilities.

The main difference is that counselling makes more space for trauma processing focused on past events whereas coaching may involve exploring the past, but not very deeply. Counselling explores the question, “how does my past shape my present and how does that inform how I want to be in this moment?” and coaching explores the question, “where do I want to go and how do I get there from this present moment?”

Frankly, there’s a lot of blurring and overlap between the two so I call most of what I do as therapy. The only time that I make a stronger differentiation is when working with folks based in the so-called US and internationally, for whom I offer coaching. As a registered therapist, I am legally only able to provide counselling services to clients based within so-called Canada.

So then what is therapy-ish?

For folks who are interested in more creative ways of co-creating therapeutic care space, I offer therapy-ish (my general practice)!

In resistance to the harmful roots and manifestations of the mental health industrial complex, in the acknowledgement of wellbeing as political, I am in the continued practice of creative care work while complicit in and participating in the industry as a professionalized practitioner. I refuse the rigid categorization and commercialization of therapeutic practice which leads me to politicizing my practice and blurring what therapy is and is not.

As a Mad & racialized femme psych survivor, I incorporate a lot of my lived experiences and embodied knowledges into my therapeutic work. As a community member with multiple relationships with most of my SDQTBIPOC clients, I prefer to explore therapeutic work beyond the question of “how can I offer care as a therapist?” and rather shifting to “what are some creative ways that we can co-create care as community members, while recognizing my responsibilities and social power as a therapist?” I also aim to orient towards therapeutic practice as a space to explore solidarity, beyond empathy as politicized care expands beyond what we do in sessions.

I will one day write further on this and what therapy-ish means to me (like, what is mental health in the context of systemic oppression??). For now, please feel free to ask questions about therapy-ish in conversation with me!

Areas of Practice

I welcome client community members with whatever variety of topics that they would like to address, especially with those related to systemic & institutional violence, liberation work & internalized oppressive narratives. We can discuss alignment in what I feel familiar and/or comfortable working with in our consult call.

With that said, the following are some topics that I particularly enjoy/appreciate working with:

• processing & re-orienting relationship with collective rage & grief

• practicing embodied joy & self-celebration

• processing white guilt, shame & ancestral healing for white settlers

• exploring disability & neurodivergence; applying crip & Mad knowledges & skills

• navigating covid conscious life and relationships in the current pandemic response

• exploring queerness, gender and sexuality; re-imagining and practicing anti-mononormative, queer, poly relating.

• building care webs, valuing platonic relationships, and practicing intentional relating & relationship transitions

• navigating conflict and building conflict resolution skills! soft skills that are required for navigating difference and tension!

• unlearning carceral logic and punishment in our personal relationships and within ourselves

• navigating suicidal ideation and so-called self-harm through an anti-carceral, harm-reductionist framework

For my understandings & politics around some of these topics, check out my blog posts.

I only work one-on-one sessions with adults at this time, with flexibility around being joined by witnesses. I do not offer youth or relationship counselling.

Therapeutic Modalities

As for “modalities,” I predominantly do talk therapy ie. good ol’ conversation (questions! reflections! oohs and aahs! sitting in silent pauses together!) with a dash of somatic practice where desired/relevant.

Somatics ie. body-based practice is helpful for moving beyond cognitive knowing to felt-sense experience/knowing. It is also helpful for folks who feel stuck in narratives ie. feel emotionally constipated, and want to explore feeling, expressing, and releasing their feelings. I am particularly fond of somatics as it can help us build a bigger range of access to emotions as well as cultivate more choicefulness in both intensity and expression of emotions.

Within conversation, I sometimes integrate components of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and Narrative Therapy but have a distaste for pure CBT or DBT. Generally, I am firm in the knowings that

• healing has existed since the beginning of time;

• we know how to heal ourselves through relationship, ritual, and culturally-rooted practices;

• many of these so-called modalities stem from (often stolen & watered down) BIPOC ancestral knowledges and these institutionalized therapeutic modalities by Western counselling psychology will not save us.

So rather than the typical modalities of Western psychology, much of my therapeutic practice is informed and shaped by my political education in anti-imperialism, Black Liberation, Queer of Colour Critique, Indigenous Sovereignty, Mad Liberation, Disability Justice, abolition, and Transformative Justice. These days, I’ve been educating myself further on class consciousness, labour justice, and SWANA/Middle Eastern histories & politics. My to-be-addressed gaps in political education include Fat Liberation, Total Liberation, drug user liberation and much of Global South politics; I currently have some familiarity with the Philippines, Palestine, and South Asia/partition.

Please share in our consult call if there are pieces of your specific lived experiences and lineages that I need to know as a therapist and I will make sure to do my homework on my own time outside of sessions.

Important Details

Phone and Video Therapy

I do not offer in-person sessions. Clients can choose between sessions on the phone or via Jane App, a HIPAA, PIPEDA, and GDPR-compliant telehealth platform.

Phone sessions are for folks who prefer to get away from the screen and simply focus on the verbal conversation, without needing internet service (Canada and US-based only).

Jane App can be used for video or voice only. Video may be preferred for folks who would like to see my face and find it helpful to engage in conversation with visual cues.

Payment & Rates

20-minute Consultation: Free

Individual Counselling & Coaching (all rates include GST)

50-min:

• Sliding Scale: Currently Unavailable

• Standard: $180

• Community Contribution: $185+

When available, I offer sliding scale through a politicized framework of sharing my own socioeconomic positioning as well as that of my general client demographic. Folks who are able/willing can contribute to community-funded sliding scale with the Community Contribution rate.

I accept payment via Interac e-transfer from clients based in Canada, Paypal from those based in the US or Europe and Wise from folks based elsewhere. Payments are requested to be made in advance of your session.

For those based in Canada, my practice is covered by the following health insurance providers (depending on the plan): Pacific Blue Cross, Sun Life Financial, Green Shield and Equitable Life of Canada.