SESSIONS
Here’s some basics about Sessions, what to expect and how to make the most of them.
Working Together
If you’re ready for counselling support to manage symptoms or reach for recovery of Toxic Stress, Trauma or Complex Trauma here’s a little about what you can expect.
Counselling is a collaborative process. While the counsellor is the expert on therapeutic process and has knowledge in many areas, the client is the expert on their own goals, lives, and experiences. Working together is essential.
Safety
Counselling is above all “safe”. This happens with attention to: care, consent, capability, confidentiality, process, space, and communication.
Client Defined Goals
Counselling is about and for the client. Overall and within each session the focus in on working toward the client’s most important goals.
Intentional Approach
Informed and Intentional Approach that reflect: accessibility, relationality, multiple-perspectives, growth, integrity and impact. (see next section)
Wholistic
Attention to psychological and emotional while incorporating the physical through somatic work and lifestyle factors as well as the spiritual.
Recovery Roadmap
The symptoms and impacts of Toxic Stress, Trauma and Complex Trauma are well research and understood as is the path to recovery.
6 Ps
Counselling for Toxic Stress, Trauma and Complex Trauma weaves together psychoeducation, presence, pacing, practice processing and potential.
Client Sheets
Clients have access to additionally provided information and worksheets for use in between sessions to help bring about change faster.
High Benefits with Limited Risk
Counselling offers benefits of resolving distress, gaining insight, shifting patterns, and increasing functioning with low risk.
50 Minute Sessions
The first session is 75 minutes to accommodate the time it takes for forms, assessment, and getting started. After that, they’re about 50 minutes.
Accessible Fees
Session Fees are $120/session (compared with $220+) with a sliding scale to accommodate different incomes and circumstances.
Flexible Format
Two Session Formats are available: in person onsite at my converted counselling-studio space OR virtually using Microsoft Teams.
Regulated Practice
As a Registered Social Worker and Trauma Recovery Counsellor, I am bound to ethics, practice standards and professional development.
Counselling Approach
An approach is how we think about, engage with and deal with something. I’ve given a lot of thought to making sure my approach is intentional and informed.
I believe in slow and steady change based on comprehensive, multi-level understanding and approaches (and leaps forward following releasing defenses, unburdening, changes in belief and strengthening of SELF).
I try to ensure that how I show up and what I offer reflects at least these six things.
Accessible
Ensuring that there is relatively easy access and limited barriers to needed information, supports or change. This might look like simplifying the complex, staging and scaffolding, using lots of psychoeducation to support clients in understanding things for themselves, making sure things are organized and easy to use, or maintaining reasonable costs.
Relational
Being relational is much more than how we interact in the moment. It is being both aware and deliberate about our placement (including role, if any) in the interaction, the relationship, the intervention or the social location because this affects position; privilege, power; perception; patterns; purpose; process; and possibilities as well as how we show up.
My placement includes:
- before – preparing and showing up helpful and appropriate with competence, credibility, ethics, and skillful means to provide safe and solid structure.
- being- cultivating and offering presence, self-awareness, authenticity and integrity.
- beside- practicing humility and recognizing that no matter my role, on some level, I am always walking beside others with my own struggles, successes, shadows and light.
- between- regard and deliberateness for what happens in the third space between myself and others such as power differentials, silence, sensitivity, invitations, curiosity, listening, loving speech, witnessing, nourishment, playfulness, compassion, and connection.
- behold- offering respect and reverence, inviting grace, engaging wonder, embracing sanctuary.
- behind- recognizing the right, responsibility and empowerment of others to lead themselves.
Multi-Angled
Recognizing complexity and being sure to engage with it in many different ways. This means steering clear of easy answers and quick fixes. It means to hold the “both/and/also” and engage with the symptoms and the underlying causes, the context and contributing factors, research and evidence from different disciplines.
Growth-Supporting
Change and transformation are fueled by growth. While some growth is naturally unfolding, much of it requires deliberate intention and support. This means holding a seemingly contrary stance such as idealistic and realistic; relaxed and hardworking; planned and organic. It means drawing from different fields such as social work, psychology, health promotion, coaching, neurolinguistic programming, spirituality, science of learning, neuroscience, etc. It means understanding and working the process of growth while also surrendering to the unknown that is unfolding, and inherently messy because that is often where the magic happens.
Integral
Recovery creates deep and multiplying change. It contributes to integration and wholeness. When people recover from toxic stress, and trauma, particularly complex trauma it ripples out in every direction. It changes who they are as well as their: relationships, parenting, lives, health, impact in the world.
Impactful
While we cannot guarantee outcomes, we can use an intentional approach that matches the situation and state of need, uses different modalities, and considers the right response for what a client wants for themselves within a continuum of support.
Largest Influences on Approach
Many people have influenced my understanding of things. These people offered the world a view of how they believed things mattered and occurred. Some put forth their perspectives based on experience, while others relied on their own or the primary research of others.
I especially appreciate those that caused me to reconsider and adjust my way of seeing things (paradigm). Some of the more significant include:
Many Clinicians/Authors on Stress, Abuse Neglect, and Trauma. Some favourites who helped me have a much more fulsome understand of the developmental impact of toxic stress and trauma and the resulting effect on an individual’s functioning and their relating and creating are Stephen Porges, Janina Fisher, Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Bruce Perry and Gabor Mate.
Urie Brofenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory- I still love this theory because it was the first one where I was exposed to the idea of systems and levels of things in a society and the idea of micro, meso and macro that is core to social work and understanding most things. This kind of systems thinking is so important in relating to the complexity of things including toxic stress, trauma, and complex trauma.
Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs– Was as influential for me as it was for so many people in the world. It got me thinking about the concept of core needs, what they were and if there was actually a hierarchy to them. Numerous other need theories have been put forth since then.
Erik Erickson and his Psychosocial Stages of Development was influential because it got me thinking about how we grow and develop through time and in stages. Of course, there are dozens and dozens of different staged development models for everything from cognition to spirituality.
Dr. Gordon Neufeld- a developmental psychologist compiled the work of many others to put forth his own understanding of child development and the importance of attachment. His work most affected me because from his perspective there were not only core needs but that there were also core developments that only unfolded to the degree that core needs were met- that notion resonated with me.
Roger Dilts and Gregory Bates and the Logical Levels– These levels are often used as part of individual coaching and help individuals understand how to make change in one level by working at any of the levels higher up. While I may not fully agree with the specific levels they put forth, I do think there is something to the notion of levels.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross Stages of Grief and Carlo C. DiClemente and J.O. Prochaska Transtheoretical Stages of Change because these were some of the first process models that I was introduced to. They got me thinking about the bigger question of how people move through things.
Anne Wilson Schaef- is a courageous truth teller. She left psychology when she believed that people’s wholeness was being lost as the profession moved more and more to the paradigm of science. Her books, “Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science- A New Model for Healing the Whole Person” and “Living in Process- Basic Truths for Living the Path of the Soul” tell her story and offer her approach.
Caroline Myss has put forth an entire body of work that brings forth the theological and the mystical into mainstream in a way that is devoted to spiritual life and development.
The spiritual aspect is the one I find to be most often missing in many theories and models.
I prefer her work to many others because it promotes development of true spiritual growth and power without the typical new age reconfiguration of spirituality that supports ego, spiritual bypassing and a hyperfocus on positive thinking and manifestation. In fact, at times her work even addresses the narcissistic tendencies that can be unintentionally reinforced by many approaches within the larger culture of self-indulgence and consumerism.
