There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to therapy. What I do know, though, is that therapy is just one of many tools to call upon when you feel the pull to re-align, reimagine, or reconnect with the life you’re in. It gives space and language to all kinds of feelings, while fundamentally centering the client as both the director and the primary beneficiary of the work.

Therapy isn’t magic, but it operates on a longer timeline than just the time it takes to participate in the sessions. Change takes repetition, practice, and considering an idea from more than one perspective. Therapists and counsellors serve to guide this process but are ultimately helping to create the tools for their clients to wield for themselves well into the future.

There’s a wonderful analogy that compares therapy to driving a car. Imagine you’re driving along, and the car begins to behave strangely. Maybe it’s rattling, smoking, or maybe a few warning lights have come on. Going to therapy is like bringing it in to a mechanic or pulling over and calling a tow truck. In these situations, you’re looking for an expert to provide guidance and suggest answers to fix the problem.

Sometimes the hope is to drop the car off and by the next morning everything’s back to normal. That might be the case the first time, but soon you and the mechanic start talking about the larger patterns. They might ask some questions about what was going on with the car when it started to have trouble. “How much had you been driving that week?” “How much gas is in the tank?” “When did the warning light come on?” Together, you and the mechanic figure out what happened and what it’ll take to get the car back on the road.

Unlike going to a mechanic, therapy doesn’t fix the problem overnight, but you start to learn about what some warning signs that could lead to trouble. Now, the car works just fine most of the time, but every so often it ends up on the side of the road again. Maybe you try what worked the first or the third time, and if those don’t work, you get back on the phone with the mechanic to brainstorm a fix so you can get rolling again. Soon enough, the answers become familiar and you start taking action before the car needs work and you go longer and longer stretches between tune-ups.

Just like in therapy, learning more strategies to get the car going again means you might find yourself needing to call the mechanic less and less.

That’s what therapy is like: it’s a process to empower you to employ strategies to tackle all the different obstacles and challenges that may show up in your life. The therapist is the mechanic, and you are the driver. My goal is to work myself out of a job.

Online Counselling

Online therapy is just like conventional therapy, only it doesn’t take place with client and practitioner in the same space.

This is simply to say that online therapy happens over the Internet using technologies like video conferencing, voice calls, or email. The goals and outcomes of online therapy are expected to be the same as in-person counselling. In fact, online therapy may be even more accessible for people who experience barriers to face-to-face therapy.

Online therapy may be a good fit if you:

• prefer to access mental health support from the comfort and familiarity of your own space,
• have a busy schedule and need flexibility in scheduling,
• want to minimize your commute to and from the appointment,
• wish to eliminate the fear of bumping into others in the waiting area of the therapy office,
• are experiencing health concerns that prevent you from leaving your home to access face-to-face therapy.

Please note: I currently have a waitlist and am not accepting new clients at this time

Similar to how there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to therapy, there's no one-size-fits-all way to grow as a clinician, and supervision is one part of that path. It's a formal relationship, one where the supervisor holds real responsibility for the work the supervisee is doing out in the world.

For those working toward Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) status with the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors, supervision is a required part of the process, logged hours, regular meetings, and a supervisor who's accountable for the clinical work happening under their guidance. There's structure to it, a rhythm that both people commit to, and an expectation that neither person walks away from it lightly until the requirement, and the learning, is complete.

To continue with the above analogy, I think of it like the relationship between an apprentice mechanic and the mechanic they work under. The apprentice is logging hours, learning the trade, and every job that goes out the door, in some sense, has the supervisor's name on it too. It's designed for someone still finding their footing, still building the muscle memory that eventually lets them work without someone standing over their shoulder.

Supervision exists to build clinicians up while they're still on the path to registration, and to make sure the people they're working with are held by more than just one set of hands.

Consultation is a different kind of relationship than supervision, looser, and built for a different moment in a clinician's career. It's a conversation between colleagues, usually both already registered, who want another set of eyes on something tricky. Nobody's signing off on anybody else's work, and it isn't tied to a registration requirement. It's less about oversight and more about company, someone knowledgeable to think alongside.

I think of it like two mechanics on the phone, both fully registered, both totes capable, who still pick up the phone once in a while. Maybe one of them has seen this particular engine problem a hundred times and the other hasn't seen it at all! Maybe it's just useful to talk it through out loud with someone who gets it.

Unlike Clinical Supervision, nobody's checking anybody's work here. It's peer to peer, and it can be a single conversation or something that happens ongoingly.

Consultation exists for clinicians who already know the road well but still want somewhere to bring the harder questions.