Frequently Asked Questions

Integrative psychotherapy begins with the belief that there is no single way to heal, and no single approach that will fit every person or every moment. I take a holistic approach, recognizing that our wellbeing is shaped by the interplay of our minds, bodies, emotions, relationships, histories, cultures, environments, and sense of meaning and connection. Therapy can therefore happen through many different pathways. It can happen through talking and making sense of things, through slowing down, listening and responding to the body, working with parts of ourselves, engaging imagination and creativity, exploring dreams, or making space for emotions to process. Together, we can draw on the approaches that feel most meaningful and supportive for you, honouring both your lived experience and your own inner wisdom.

Over time, therapy can help transform not only how you experience the present, but also help you move towards possibilities that may not have felt available before. This might mean feeling less overwhelmed or anxious, responding differently when old triggers arise, making choices that better reflect what matters to you, and helping you navigate difficult emotions with greater ease. You may feel more alive in yourself and aligned in your relationships.

You don’t need to know. One of the benefits of working integratively is that we can collaborate to find an approach that best fits your needs, goals, preferences, and nervous system. Some clients are drawn to body-based approaches such as Brainspotting, somatic therapy, or EFT, while others resonate with Internal Family Systems, hypnotherapy, or dreamwork. Often, we weave together elements of different approaches depending on what feels most supportive and effective for you.

No. Therapy is tailored to you. We can draw from different approaches depending on your goals, preferences, and what feels most supportive in the moment. The focus is not on following a specific technique, but on creating a therapeutic process that supports meaningful and lasting change.

It’s completely understandable to feel a little uncertain about what to expect from a first therapy session. You don’t need to know exactly what to say or have everything figured out before you arrive. The first session offers space for us to get to know one another, talk about what brings you to therapy, and consider how your current experiences are affecting your everyday life. We can talk about where you would like to experience more ease, flexibility, or capacity, explore your hopes and goals, and address any concerns or questions you may have about therapy. You are always in charge of what you choose to share, and you can share as much or as little as feels right for you. Together, we will begin to identify what feels most important to you and what kind of support might be helpful.

I want therapy to be a place where you feel seen as a whole person—not defined by what is difficult right now. We can make space for the parts of your life that feel hard while also holding your strengths, resilience, creativity, values, relationships, and the ways you have learned to navigate what you’ve been through. From a trauma-informed perspective, we can gently become curious about patterns that may be creating difficulty now and how they may have once helped you cope or protect yourself. You get to decide what feels meaningful to notice and work with. Together, we can make space for your own wisdom, resources, and capacities to become more accessible, so you can move toward a life that feels more like your own.

This is one of the most common and understandable frustrations people bring to therapy. Many patterns are rooted in the limbic brain, nervous system, implicit memory, and attachment experiences rather than conscious thought alone. These deeper systems are designed to help us survive and protect us from perceived danger. As a result, they do not always change simply because we understand them. Experiential, somatic, attachment-based, and brain-body approaches help create new emotional, relational, and neural responses that allow these patterns to shift at their source.

Understanding our experiences is important. We are meaning-making creatures, and when things begin to make sense, compassion and choice can sometimes become more accessible. But insight alone does not always create change. Many patterns related to trauma, attachment, anxiety, shutdown, and emotional distress are shaped through experiences, relationships, learning, and patterns of response that can become deeply familiar and automatic. They may show up through emotional reactions, body sensations, relationship dynamics, or responses that happen before we have time to consciously understand them. Therapy can deepen our understanding while also creating opportunities to experience something different. It can develop new ways of relating to ourselves, our emotions, our bodies, and others, and gradually integrate these experiences into how we move through the world.

Life often asks us to keep moving even when we are overwhelmed, disconnected, or carrying more than we realize. Slowing down in therapy creates a little more space to notice what may be easy to miss when we are moving quickly: a feeling, sensation, impulse, image, need, or shift in how we are experiencing ourselves. Nothing needs to be forced or figured out. By giving ourselves time to notice and be with what is present, we can become more attuned to our experience and make room for new understanding, choice, and possibility.

Our nervous system is continually responding to what is happening within us and around us, helping us adapt to changing circumstances, relationships, and demands. Working with the nervous system is not simply about learning to stay calm or “regulate” difficult emotions. It is about developing greater flexibility by being able to shift, mobilize, pause, connect, recover, and respond in ways that fit the moment. When our responses become more flexible, we may have greater access to choice and a wider range of ways of meeting life’s challenges. This work can help us become more curious about our patterns of activation and settling, while supporting the body’s natural capacity for adaptation, resilience, and change.

Human beings are wired for connection. Our early relationships can shape how we come to understand ourselves, experience safety and belonging, navigate stress, and relate to others. Our attachment experiences can continue to influence how we experience trust, closeness, vulnerability, and worthiness throughout life, while recognizing that we are continually shaped and reshaped by relationships and experiences along the way. Many of the struggles we experience can be connected, in different ways, to experiences of connection, disconnection, protection, loss, or relational wounds. Understanding these patterns can help us make sense of our experiences while creating opportunities for new experiences of connection, safety, and ways of relating.

Consent is an ongoing process, not a one-time conversation. Because many people come to therapy with experiences involving power imbalances, boundary violations, or feeling unheard, I believe it is important that therapy itself be collaborative and transparent. You always have the right to ask questions, decline an intervention, change your mind, slow down, or let me know when something does not feel right. Therapy is focused on your goals and what feels beneficial in your life. My goal is not to direct your healing but to walk alongside you in a way that honours your autonomy, wisdom, and choice.

Being trauma-informed means understanding that experiences of trauma can shape how we feel, think, relate, and respond to the world, while recognizing that each person’s experience is unique. A trauma-informed approach in session emphasizes safety, choice, collaboration, consent, transparency, trust, and respect for the ways people have adapted to what they have lived through. Trauma-informed care also recognizes the importance of relationships, culture, context, and power in shaping our experiences and our pathways toward healing.

Trauma can be connected to experiences that have happened in the past, but it can also be part of what you are living with now. Sometimes an experience has ended while its echoes continue to shape how you feel, think, relate, and respond; at other times, social inequity, loss, or other sources of stress and harm may still be ongoing. You understand your context best, including what you have needed to adapt, protect yourself, and survive. These responses make sense within the circumstances you have lived through and may still serve an important purpose in your life today. Therapy can offer a space to gently understand these responses and their reverberations, without assuming they need to change or that your circumstances can be changed through therapy. You do not need to tell the story of a traumatic experience to do meaningful therapeutic work. We can work with thoughts, emotions, sensations, patterns, relationships, and the effects of an experience without describing details, always at a pace that respects your capacity and choices. Your consent and agency remain central. You decide what you share, and you can pause or change direction at any time.

Grief can take many forms, including the loss of a person, relationship, health, identity, dreams, connection to a place, or a familiar way of living. Therapy can offer space to make room for grief and attend to the many changes that can accompany loss. Together, we can honour what has been lost and the continued connection that can remain in its absence, while also finding ways to carry what matters forward, reconnect with meaning, and gradually make room for what is possible now.

Living with chronic pain or illness can mean learning to live differently in a body that may no longer feel predictable or fully within your control. It can change how you move through the world, what you have energy for, how you see yourself, and what you imagine for your future. Along the way, there may be grief, uncertainty, frustration, fear, changes in relationships and identity, and the ongoing process of discovering what is possible within your changing capacity. Therapy can offer space to attend to these experiences. We can work with the emotional, relational, and embodied aspects of living with chronic conditions, while making space for questions of meaning, identity, values, and what matters most to you.

Clinical Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) uses tapping as part of a broader therapeutic process. While tapping can be practiced on its own or used alongside affirmations and guided exercises, Clinical EFT combines tapping with focused attention to thoughts, emotions, memories, sensations, and other aspects of experience within a structured therapeutic framework. It is a collaborative, co-guided process: I provide the framework and support while you guide the content and direction. The work is trauma-informed and paced according to your capacity, with the focus not simply on feeling calmer, but on being with what is present in ways that can support meaningful processing, integration, flexibility, and choice.

No. Clinical hypnotherapy is very different from stage hypnosis. Stage hypnosis is designed for entertainment and often relies on performance, suggestion, and audience dynamics. Most people experience hypnosis as a state of focused attention and increased awareness rather than a loss of consciousness or control. You remain an active participant throughout the process, and the work stays collaborative—you are always able to choose, respond, pause, or change direction. You remain aware and in control and cannot be made to do something against your will or reveal something you do not want to share. My approach is primarily oriented toward using clinical hypnosis to support new perspectives, possibilities, resources, and ways of responding in relation to what you want to strengthen or experience moving forward.

Being evidence-informed means drawing on the best available research and clinical knowledge when considering how we work together. Much of the research that informs contemporary psychotherapy comes from Western scientific traditions, which offer valuable ways of understanding human experience and evaluating therapeutic approaches. At the same time, science is not the only way of knowing. Knowledge can also be held through lineages, cultural traditions, lived experience, relationship, embodied and intuitive knowing, spirituality, and the wisdom we develop through our own lives. I value research while also approaching it with humility, recognizing both what it can illuminate and what it may not yet capture. Therapy is most effective when these forms of knowledge are integrated thoughtfully and collaboratively. Our work can hold these different ways of knowing in conversation, with respect for your culture, values, experiences, and your own inner wisdom.

Yes. My work is informed by research in areas such as trauma, attachment, neuroscience, memory reconsolidation, emotional processing, and survival responses. The approaches I use—including Brainspotting, Internal Family Systems, Clinical Emotional Freedom Techniques, Somatic Therapy, Dreamwork, and Clinical Hypnotherapy—have growing research bases, varying across approaches and applications. I stay attentive to the evolving research while also drawing on clinical expertise, lived experience, and the individual needs and preferences of each person I work with.