Psychologist, gardener, cook, cyclist, and family guy...
I love all those aspects of my life and identity. Before becoming a psychologist I spent 17 years (starting at age 15) cooking in gastro pubs, restaurants, and fast food joints too! That work helped to pay my way through a BA Honours in Psychology as well as all my graduate training at the University of Alberta. I have a Masters in Educational Psychology (counselling), and I also spent an amazing 6 years in PhD studies until a difficult life circumstance had me leave my program before completing. Those were tough times, but it was 100% the right choice. After almost 19 years of working as a counsellor, psychologist, and Director at the University of Alberta, I am taking my experience outside of the academic context in order to reach more people and find balance.
I garden (flowers, perennials, and veggies of all kinds), am an avid home cook, and ride my bicycle just about everywhere I can. I really love to connect with nature in different ways through those joyful pursuits.
My partner and I have been together for over 18 years, raising kids and cats and houseplants along the way. We love to travel together and find as much down time as we can.
As a psychologist, I believe that we bring our whole lives to the great privilege of helping others. My life experiences have taught me so much, and I draw on these in my therapy practice. To learn, nurture, grow, be curious, and not be too afraid of failure or doing something new...
Our Mission
How do I work? I focus on creating a trusting relationship, and understanding your experiences and challenges from your perspective first. I believe a good therapist is active in counselling: listening supporting the client, suggesting possible strategies, proposing new interpretations, offering insights, organizing more structured therapy approaches when needed, and so on. But none of that should be an imposition; we have to work as a team to be successful!
I think some folks really struggle because they have adopted the problem as their identity - sand that might be you! I see the problems you face as separate from your identity. You have competencies, values, and abilities that will help you to reduce the influence of problems in your life, and part of my work is to help you identify and use these skills.
At the heart of it I think therapy is a lot of learning and growing, and that leads to you to living more of the life you want to live.
I'm supposed to tell you I have had specialized training in: Accelerated Resolution Therapy for trauma and PTSD symptoms, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia and sleep issues, Clinical Hypnosis, Exposure with Response Prevention for OCD, plus additional Narrative Therapy training that I use for many issues. Like most psychologists these days, I am very familiar with many CBT strategies, humanistic approaches, and so on.
I have a keen interest working with professionals who suffer stress and burnout due to the moral injuries they experience in the workplace (and other parts of life, too), like teachers, health care professionals, academics, corporate folks, graduate students and post-docs, etc. I also have had good success supporting folks with chronic injuries and illnesses, perhaps in part because I have lived experience in this area. Lastly, a lot of my work involved helping folks with impact of trauma, using a variety of interventions and approaches because one size does not fit all when it comes to trauma work.
Clients have described me as humorous, caring, creative, a direct communicator, honest, insightful, and patient. But let's face it, nobody can work with everyone. Fit matters. I hope from this page you can get a sense of who I am and if I might be someone to help you.