Where It All Began
My journey started around age fifteen, when my granny gave me a subscription to Psychology Today. In the late 70s, receiving that magazine felt like the height of sophistication, and I devoured every issue and felt an early pull toward understanding people.
I still remember myself sitting in a lecture in highschool, bored, doodling a cartoon character and giving them academic credentials that I didn’t even understand. I now see this as an early, accidental hint at who I would someday become.
Falling In, Falling Apart, and Starting Over
I got into the honours psychology program and started working at a children’s mental health treatment centre, a job I loved. Meanwhile, my own life was beginning to fracture in ways I couldn’t ignore. Like many young adults, I carried my struggles quietly until I simply couldn’t anymore. After finishing my degree, I ended up in the mental health system as a service user, spending almost four years navigating it from the inside. Soon I realized it wasn’t the path for me, and so I told my team that I was ready to move on. They feared it was the worst possible choice I could make, but for me it marked the start of reclaiming my life.
Finding My Academic Path
After finding my footing again, I turned toward graduate school. I weighed two options: counselling psychology or educational psychology. After speaking with program chairs, it became clear that my deeper interest lay in understanding how people make sense of things. And because I’d had a robust education in counselling psychology as an undergrad, it made sense to do my next degree in educational psychology. So I went on to complete my master’s degree while working in the mental health system. The itch to pursue a PhD had been with me for years. Eventually, I found the right program, a doctorate in Health Professional Education, and the focus of my research was the use of a dialogic approach to meaning making in those who experience compromised emotional wellbeing.
Gathering Experience Along the Way
My professional life became a patchwork of deeply varied experiences. I worked in hospitals, community agencies, and the Canadian Mental Health Association. I did quality assurance, applied research, family psychoeducation, and mental health education.
Then academia came calling again. After defending my PhD in 2014, I was invited to teach undergraduates at Western. In classic academic fashion, I had about two weeks to design a course from scratch. Teaching undergrads taught me more about engagement than any textbook ever could.
That period also became an intense phase of self-study. With full access to academic libraries, I dove headfirst into theory and research. Over time, I found my professional grounding in psychodynamic and existential approaches, shaped by decades of curiosity about human sense-making.
Understanding the Human Condition
Years of working in mental health have taught me that we are far more primitive than we like to believe. Vulnerability isn’t something we’re naturally good at, so when a person reaches a point where they think, “I can’t carry this alone anymore”, that moment is filled with extraordinary courage.
It’s humbling to realize how many clients I meet who share the most intimate truths of their lives with me… someone they barely know. Because of that, I work intentionally to create a safe space for them to share their vulnerability.
I often describe therapy as “safeholding” – creating a safe holding space where people feel seen, heard, and acknowledged.
Helping Clients Understand Their Core Narrative
I developed an acronym called I.E.A.T.S.I. (innate temperament; early attachment; trauma & adversity; social determinants of health; intelligence) as a way of helping clients to create an understanding of how what they lived and internalized during their formative years enabled the writing of their core narrative.
We look at this against the backdrop of child development theory, using this to help them create an understanding of how the states of distress they live with today, got their start. We then take this information to help them to identify where these challenges, which started in their early years, are active in their life now. This understanding is used to help them to challenge the distressing thoughts, feelings and experiences, all with the idea of enabling them to rewrite their core narrative. We do so with the acknowledgement that although history is permanent, we can develop new and less distressed relationships with past trauma and adversity.
Watching someone make sense of their own experiences is powerful, and it's the spark that opens the door to real, sustainable change.
What This Work Has Taught Me
Our human condition is complex, and doing this work for decades has taken away any illusion that we can completely eradicate suffering. By following the trail of breadcrumbs that takes us back to the formation of our core narrative, we can make sense of our history. In doing so, we can learn to live more peacefully and productively, which is one of the primary goals of psychotherapy.
For Anyone Considering Therapy
If someone is just beginning therapy and feeling unsure, I always tell them: go gently. This is your subjective, personal journey, and there is no right pace, or right way. Change is often slow and quiet, like watching grass grow, so you don’t notice it moment to moment, but one day you look back and see how far you’ve come. That’s the beauty of therapy.
Where I Am Now
Today, I work three days a week as a psychotherapist, blending more than thirty years of lived experience, academic study, teaching, and clinical practice. My life and career have taken a winding, unexpected path, but everything has led me back to the same question that first hooked me at fifteen with that magazine: How do we make sense of the things that happen to us?
Helping clients explore that question is still, after all these years, the greatest privilege of my work.
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