“Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.”

-Judith Lewis Herman

You’ve mastered all the coping techniques: going for a walk, meditation, Netflix, listening to music, playing video games… so many coping techniques. And while distraction is a valid way to deal with overwhelming feelings, you want to get to the root of your anxiety and be confident you can stay above water instead of feeling like you’re about to drown.

It’s normal in times of turbulence and change to feel anxious. It’s a natural response to not knowing what’s next. But your anxiety is next level. It robs you of joy, friendships and pursuing your calling. You sense that the life you want is just beyond it.

Many of us never got an education on emotional health. You were taught basic hygiene, math, how to drive, and do your taxes but you didn’t have someone who modeled how to deal with anxiety well. So it makes sense you’re at a loss when figuring out how to do it on your own.

Advice like, “It’s all in your head,” “Stay positive,” and “Stop overthinking” doesn’t help. Often, it just makes you feel worse.

Because it’s not all your head. Anxiety remains an evolutionary adaptation from times when the most vigilant (read: anxious) person survived. It can emerge now when present experiences resemble unsafe and overwhelming past experiences. Your anxiety is trying to keep you safe by keeping what is outside your control inside your control.

In therapy, we’ll explore how your anxiety is trying to help you and what it’s protecting you from. We’ll create an emotionally safe and supportive environment so that you can feel strengthened and confident in your ability to get through uncertainty and take the necessary risks in creating the life you desire.

Living with depression is like running a marathon with a broken leg while everyone runs past you hollering “Yeah, yeah, broken leg, boo-hoo, we’re all tired.” And each day you wake up and get ready to run that race again.

You're exhausted trying to be fine. You want to be alone, but not lonely. You want friends but hate socializing. You want to build a life you can be proud of, but can’t find the motivation to start.

You feel like you don’t belong in the circus of this world. You don’t care much for it either. You feel like a traveling visitor who hasn't decided whether you're going to stay. Because the world seems like a cold and cruel place. The chasm between who it expects you to be and who you truly are is making you miserable.

In therapy, my goal is to create for you what is essential for each one of us - a sense of belonging. We’ll explore what emotions may lie underneath the numbness that deserve attention, compassion and care. And through deeper connection to your needs, we’ll create the opportunity for motivation to emerge.

When you were a kid, being alone meant you were safe. Safe from teasing and bullying. Safe from your parents’ criticism and erratic mood-swings. Alone is where you didn’t have to be self-conscious, where you could be yourself without worrying what anyone else thought. You got used to seeking refuge in a quiet space, not a shoulder to lean on.

In order to hear your own thoughts, you had to isolate.

You learned to be quiet and passive, or else draw attention to yourself and feel threatened.

A safe life has been a solitary one. You feel the pangs of loneliness, but the risk of being seen, judged and rejected is too much to bear. You crave to be known while never wanting to be seen.

Together, we can navigate the push and pull that is leading you toward both aloneness and connection. We'll honour how your instinct to keep to yourself has served you all these years. And we'll create the opportunity for you to explore how you can use self-compassion to create the relationships you desire.

You can’t talk about a single moment that changed your life or caused you to lose yourself. What is particularly cruel about your trauma is multiple experiences ate away at your sense of self bit by bit over several years.

Complex PTSD is hard to validate because it happens through the everyday moments of childhood that made you feel insignificant, ashamed, unwanted, or at risk of losing someone you love. At the time, you told yourself not to make a fuss and it wasn’t a big deal. But the everyday hurts add up, and you’re realizing the way you were treated was a big deal.

Our first step together will be establishing trust and safety in the here and now so that you can gently and courageously attend to wounds from the past with support at your side. We can grieve for the child who was overpowered and overwhelmed. And through the moments that make you feel small and helpless today, we can help you embody an understanding that as an adult you can have the resources and strength to champion yourself and put your needs first.

You’re not the person your abuser(s) said you are. You remind yourself regularly that you are actually good. But it’s hard to shake those powerful core beliefs that you're not worthy, not lovable, and not good enough. As a kid, you assumed the adults were right and you were wrong. Their messages and mistreatment formed your first ideas of what you deserve. And that doesn't get undone overnight.

You want to live true yourself, but internalized gaslighting causes you to second-guess your instincts. You strive for healthy relationships, but get stuck in trauma-bonding patterns. The intensity of going through extremely emotional situations with your abuser has biologically changed how you respond to relationships and connection. While you want change, growing up in an unsafe home has given unsafe situations today more holding power.

In therapy, you will learn how to notice, honor and feel your emotions so you can respond to them instead of reacting from them. You will learn to navigate the balance between personal responsibility, asking for support and honouring both your needs and the boundaries of others in your relationships. We'll process the anger, grief and sadness that didn’t receive the space it needed for so long in a safe way that provides you clarity and relief.

You grew up in an affluent home. Your parents fed, clothed, educated and provided you with good experiences and opportunities. Now, you feel guilty complaining about what seemed like abundance in childhood. But you have a feeling deep down that the difficulties you’re experiencing now - low self-esteem, depression, and feeling like a failure - have a lot to do with how you were raised.

Because true riches aren't material. While they took care of your basic needs, your parents rarely asked about or noticed how you felt. And you got the message that your feelings didn't matter.

So you survived by retreating inside a shell.

You may be saying, “They were doing their best” or “I’m too sensitive and needy.” Which makes sense because you were told you have nothing to complain about. But by shutting out your emotional needs, you’re disconnecting from yourself. And it’s preventing you from connecting meaningfully to other people, to your work, and to pursuing your life with purpose.

The absence of emotional support in childhood can be as damaging and long-lasting as other traumas. Your parents meant well, but they had difficulties dealing with and expressing their own emotions and didn't pay sufficient attention to yours. As a result, you missed out on essential emotional skills, like learning to identify the source of your anxiety, how to properly express your anger, how to process sadness, or how to apologize well. In therapy, we'll explore the vital information your emotions provide to you. You'll learn how to use them to jumpstart your work, relationships and connection to yourself.

Our culture runs on three types of self-esteem :

• Performance-based esteem - I have worth because of what I can do.

• Other-based esteem - I have worth if other people approve of me.

• Attribute-based esteem - I have worth based on what I look like and what I have.

It’s understandable you learned to base your sense of worth on external factors. It’s encouraged in our homes, culture and society. But this way of finding your worth is fickle. Some days, you’re okay with who you are and other days you feel like you aren’t enough.

My favourite definition of healthy self-esteem comes from therapist Terry Real: healthy self-esteem is being able to hold yourself in warm regard while acknowledging your flaws. Embracing both your magic and your mistakes is not an easy task. In therapy, we’ll work on failing without feeling like a failure and not defining yourself by success. We’ll create the opportunity for you to experience that what it feels like to be enough just as you are.

The toxic aspects of authoritarian religions - intimidation, coercion, fear mongering, guilt-tripping, shaming, gaslighting, purity culture and bigotry - can cause long-term psychological damage. But there is little public recognition about the trauma or emotional abuse of religion. Except for Twitter and Reddit, making sense of your experience with religion and your faith community has been a lonely journey into the unknown, questioning over and over again what is true or untrue. Daring to trust your own instincts and reasoning is new and uncomfortable territory.

Your beliefs and religious community have been the cornerstone of your life. Its consistency grounded you. It was a one-stop-shop for meeting all your major needs – social support, a coherent worldview, meaning and direction in your life, structured activities, and emotional and spiritual fulfillment. Questioning the fold risks loss. It can mean the loss of not only family and friends, but your story as you have known it.

You deserve support at this crucial point in your story. It makes sense that you're grappling with every emotion in the book because of how closely wound your identity has been with your beliefs. Whether you are deconstructing or demolishing your old assumptive world, we’ll create the space for you to reconstruct a new worldview and identity.

The field of psychology has been mainly influence by White men. A few women made a mark here and there, too. But the lack of diverse voices in the creation of psychology has perpetuated massive flaws, including disregarding race-based traumatic stress until Robert T. Carter drew attention to it in 2007.

There is unfair pressure placed on minorities to Be Okay With How They Are Treated. You grew up not voicing your discomfort when you experienced microaggressions to not shatter the harmony and comfort of those around you. No view of trauma is complete without recognizing the impact of sociocultural forces on you.

Therapy has often failed communities of colour. It can be retraumatizing if the therapist suggests you change how you interpret the world so you are not as hurt, angered and aggrieved by it. But you have very good reasons to be hurt, angered and aggrieved. You carry not just your trauma, but that of your loved ones, your community and those who came before you. It's not a therapist's place to suggest you calm your hypervigilance and mistrust. Because how can you not be hypervigilant in a society that doesn't acknowledge it's crimes against you?

If I look like you and you want a therapist who can share in the experience of what it is to be Asian presenting in Canada, I'm here for you. If I don't look like you and you're hesitant to do therapy with me, I'm here for you and your caution is valid.

Because no amount of empathy, sympathy, or validation from me as your therapist will make your pain from race-based trauma disappear. What I can provide is a soft place for you to a land in the chaos. To rest. To explore. Because you have a right to rest, safety and exploration.