My belief in the tremendous value of counselling and psychotherapy emerges from personal experiences of early childhood abandonment, trauma, substance abuse and infant loss. I believe, as research supports, that creating a safe therapeutic relationship in which a client feels connected and understood is essential to the process of meaningful change.
Together we will consider the often deep underlying issues that manifest in problems today and explore new ways of understanding both the self and these problems with the goal of sustainable and life-long change.
I am dedicated to staying up to date on the latest evidence-based approaches in counselling psychology and psychotherapy. I have spent many years studying a range of treatment approaches including Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), Attachment Theory, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), The Neufeld Method, Interpersonal Neurobiology and Mindfulness. I have adopted a trauma informed theoretical framework which is relational, experiential and emotionally focused.
My practice is rooted in my core approach of Accelerative Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). I will often blend in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Gottman Couples Therapy.
Many men in Western culture are socialized to not express their feelings, to deal with issues in a “logical or rational” way, and to believe that being vulnerable is a weakness. It is common for some men to not only have difficulty sharing their feelings but to feel unsure as to what they are feeling. I support my male clients by creating a safe space where they can share their issues and feelings. Often times when emotions are repressed or denied, unhealthy or inappropriate behaviors can manifest.
Key areas: Fatherhood, Intimacy, Leadership, Managing Feelings, Abandonment, Emotions, Anxiety.
I approach addiction using a Narrative lens that encourages clients to define the problem and then to externalize it as separate from their own selves. This enables clients to make meaning of their lives as distinct and separate from their 'problem'. It enables them to reclaim their identity and re-construct their life story by viewing through the lens of when they resisted against the problem or when they did it right. This perspective restores hope because the client is able to focus on their new self and the times when they did not fall into an abusive cycle or times when they lived a life that had meaning for them. As a result, I find my clients begin to take the courageous journey towards complete transformational change where they have a new vision and hope for their lives.
Key areas: Alcohol and substance abuse, Sexual compulsivity, Love and attachment issues.
I specialize in helping clients discover their vocation and future vision. Together we create a roadmap to guide him or her towards the life he/she wants to live.
Key areas: Personal Leadership, Discovering your purpose and meaning, Career change and discovery.
As an individual who has experienced the damaging effects of early childhood trauma, I am interested in the perspective that believes that many of our adult difficulties result from early trauma. Trauma occurs in many forms including work related, physical, emotional, and sexual abuses as well as witnessing violence and physical neglect. These traumas often impact our attachment style and subsequent coping methods. I work with clients to re-build a safe attachment whereby they can experience the emotions that lead to healing, resiliency and transformation.
Key areas: early childhood physical, mental and sexual abuse; attachment trauma; OSI; Combat related PTSD;
I work with my clients to change how they parent their children. I help men to overcome their fears and the internal roadblocks that keep them from connecting with their sons and daughters. When fathers learn to show up and be involved in their children’s lives they make a positive impact in the health of their children.
Key areas: attachment, alpha children, parenting
Infertility and pregnancy loss is a silent sorrow that can leave you feeling very alone and isolated. Unless you have walked this journey, you may find that most cannot understand what if feels like despite their best intentions. I have walked this journey with my wife and witnessed and felt the deep sorrow, struggles and hopelessness that ensues. It is my intention to create an empathetic space where individuals and couples can come to feel heard and understood. I work with my clients to grieve the loss and gently accept to move forward and walk the road together.
Key areas: infertility, pregnancy loss.
Have you or a loved one been diagnosed with cancer? If so, processing the impact of a diagnosis and seeking emotional support may be important for you. As a former clinician at InspireHealth, Canada’s leading Supportive Cancer Care Organization, I have a breadth of experience supporting individuals and their close family members living with cancer. In my experience, a diagnosis often presents with symptoms of trauma and our work together can offer vital support to take steps towards healing and creating a plan for what comes next.
I work with couples to restore an emotional connection and increase both emotional and physical intimacy.
EFT is the most researched and effective approach for distressed couples. It was developed in the ’80s and has a very strong empirical base. It as been tested and shown to create improvements in 90% of the couples that come to therapy.
As its name suggests, it is an approach that focuses on how people deal with their emotions, how they send emotional signals to their spouse, and how this emotion becomes the music of their interactional dance. As an attachment-oriented approach it assumes that we all have very deep needs for safe connection and emotional contact, and that when we don’t get those needs, we get stuck in very negative interactional patterns.
EFT gets right to the heart of the problems that keep relationships from being deeply satisfying. It is designed to stop the negative and stuck patterns in marriages and other primary relationships, transforming them into the loving, caring connection and understanding you desire.
Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), is an approach that gives patients corrective emotional and relational experiences that mobilize changes in the brain – American Psychological Association (APA)
Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) focuses on bringing about healing by exploring difficult experiences that have had a profound relational or emotional effect on a client’s life experience. The goal of AEDP is to help individuals tap into inner resources for healing and confront and deal with emotional traumas instead of resorting to defensive tactics. It allows individuals to see their own internal coping skills that were previously hidden and to awaken those inner strengths as a natural response to life’s circumstances.
Developed by Dr. Diana Fosha, the author of the The Transforming Power of Affect and editor of Undoing Aloneness and the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0, AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) is an ever-emergent model, ever-growing through the ongoing contributions of the AEDP faculty and the members of the AEDP community.
Crisis and suffering provide opportunities to awaken extraordinary capacities that otherwise might lie dormant, unknown and untapped. AEDP is about experientially making the most of these opportunities for both healing and transformation. Key to its therapeutic action is the undoing of aloneness and thus, the co-creation of a therapeutic relationship experienced as both safe haven and secure base. Once that’s established, we work with emotional experience, working experientially toward healing trauma and suffering, and toward expanding emergent positive transformational experiences.
AEDP has empirical support for its effectiveness for a variety of psychological issues and problems including depression, general psychological distress, interpersonal problems, negative thoughts, and emotion dysregulation. It enhances positive psychological functioning such as self-esteem, self-compassion, and wellbeing. Please go here for a list of AEDP Research Publications.
The AEDP Institute is devoted to providing a forum for an emergent community of clinicians. We seek to co-create environments — clinical, intellectual, collegial — of shared values. We seek ours to be a community of co-created safety and security from which the boundless exploration that is our aim can take place.
There is no better way to capture the ethos of AEDP than to say this: we try to help our patients—and ourselves—become stronger at the broken places. By working with trauma, loss, and the painful consequences of the limitations of human relatedness, we discover places that have always been strong, places that were never broken.
AEDP seeks to clinically make neuroplasticity happen. Championing our innate healing capacities, AEDP has roots in and resonances with many disciplines — among them interpersonal neurobiology, attachment theory, emotion theory and affective neuroscience, body-focused approaches, and last but not least, transformational studies.
Through undoing of aloneness, and through the in-depth processing of difficult emotional and relational experiences, as well as new transformational experiences, the AEDP clinician fosters the emergence of new and healing experiences for the client, and with them resources, resilience and a renewed zest for life.
As a certified AEDP therapist, I seek to develop a secure base for clients so that they can work through their overwhelming experiences towards a place of connection, hope and transformation. AEDP is one of the most rigorous psychotherapy certification programs in the world and therapists invest years of advanced post-graduate education and supervision to develop an embodied stance to support effective and sustainable change in clients. You can learn more about AEDP by clicking here: www.aedpinstitute.org
Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) is a highly effective, integrative therapeutic approach used to address a wide range of problems. It has been shown to effectively decrease or eliminate the symptoms of post traumatic stress and significantly reduce the length of treatment.
As a certified EMDR therapist, I will work with you to resolve symptoms by reprocessing traumatic and disturbing events, memories, thoughts and feelings so that they no longer negatively affect your wellbeing. I will help you identify and process through unresolved experiences and current triggers and assist you in developing the skills needed for future success. To learn more about EMDR please visit: www.emdr.com
To learn more about what EMDR does please watch this video https://youtu.be/Pkfln-ZtWeY
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a well-known humanistic approach to psychotherapy formulated in the 1980’s and developed in tandem with the science of adult attachment, a profound developmental theory of personality and intimate relationships. This science has expanded our understanding of individual dysfunction and health as well as the nature of love relationships and family bonds. Attachment views human beings as innately relational, social and wired for intimate bonding with others. The EFT model prioritizes emotion and emotional regulation as the key organizing agents in individual experience and key relationship interactions.
EFT is best known as a cutting edge, tested and proven couple intervention and is also used to address individual depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress (EFIT – Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy) and to repair family bonds (EFFT – Emotionally Focused Family Therapy). This model operationalizes the principles of attachment science using non-pathologizing experiential (paralleling Carl Rogers) and relational systems techniques (paralleling Salvador Minuchin) to focus on and change core organizing factors in both the self and key relationships. To learn more about
To learn more about EFT please go to https://iceeft.com/
John Gottman, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Washington, entered the field of psychological research with a background in advanced mathematics and statistical analysis. In the course of his 40+ year career he has developed mathematical models, scales, and formulas to identify the elements of stability in relationships and the interactive patterns that cause couples to divorce. Gottman was drawn to this research topic due to his own puzzlement at how people develop happy relationships.
Gottman’s studies pointed to relationship difficulties caused by the “Four Horsemen,” named after the famous Albrecht Durer engraving Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
These factors predictive of divorce include:
1. Criticism of the partner’s personality
2. Defensiveness
3. Stonewalling, or refusing to interact
4. Contempt
Couples who function effectively treat each other with consideration, and are supportive of each other.
The goals of the Gottman Method include increasing closeness and friendship behaviors, addressing conflict productively, and building a life of shared meaning together. The Gottman Method involves customizing principles from the research to each couple’s particular patterns and challenges.
The Seven Principles include the following concepts:
Build Love Maps: This refers to an ongoing awareness of our partners’ worlds as they move through time: how they think and feel, what day-to-day life is like for them, and their values, hopes, aspirations, and stresses.
Express Fondness and Admiration: Couples who function well are able to appreciate and enjoy most aspects of each partner’s behavior and learn to live with differences.
Turn Toward One Another: Conversational patterns of interest and respect, even about mundane topics are crucial to happiness. Couples who turn toward successfully maintain a 20:1 ratio of expressing interest or acknowledgment vs. ignoring conversational gambits. This is referred to as the “Emotional Bank Account.” Couples who are highly successful keep a 5:1 ratio in conflict discussions, even Turning Towards while arguing.
Accept Influence: Members of a couple who take the other partner’s preferences into account and are willing to compromise and adapt are happiest. Being able to yield and maintain mutual influence, while avoiding power struggles, helps couples keep a balance of power that feels reasonable and builds trust.
Solve Problems That Are Solvable: Couples who can find compromise on issues are using five tactics. They soften start up so the beginning of the conversation leads to a satisfactory end. They offer and respond to repair attempts, or behaviors that maintain the emotional connection and emphasize “we/us” over individual needs. They effectively soothe themselves and their partner. They use compromise and negotiation skills. They are tolerant of one another’s vulnerabilities and ineffective conversational habits, keeping the focus on shared concern for the well-being of the relationship.
Manage Conflict and Overcome Gridlock: The Gottman Method helps couples manage, not resolve, conflict. Conflict is viewed as inherent in relationship and doesn’t go away. Happy couples report the majority of their conflicts, 69% are perpetual in nature, meaning they are present throughout the course of time and are dealt with only as needed. These recurrent themes become part of the couple’s shared landscape and are kept in perspective, not dwelt upon.
Create Shared Meaning: Connection in relationship occurs as each person experiences the multitude of ways in which their partner enriches their life with a shared history and helps them find meaning and make sense of struggles.
To learn more please go to https://www.gottman.com
Serving clients in Delta, Vancouver, Richmond, Surrey and across the lower mainland and BC. I offer both in person and online counselling.
