Our first session is about getting to know you — not getting your entire life story in 50 minutes.

We’ll talk about what brings you to therapy, what’s happening in your life right now, and what you hope might be different. I may ask about relevant experiences, relationships, family or cultural context, and what you’ve already tried.

You decide what you’re comfortable sharing. By the end, we’ll usually have a better sense of what we might focus on together.

That’s exactly what the free 15-minute consultation is for.

You can tell me a little about what brings you to counselling, ask questions about how I work, and get a sense of whether you feel comfortable talking with me.

Therapeutic fit matters. There’s no obligation to book a session afterward if it doesn’t feel like the right match.

Not at all.

Some people come to therapy because something specific has happened — a loss, relationship difficulty, major transition, or period of overwhelm. Others are functioning fairly well but notice that something doesn’t feel quite right.

You might want to understand yourself better, change a pattern you keep repeating, feel more confident in your decisions, or simply have a place to sort through what’s been on your mind.

You don’t need a diagnosis, a crisis, or a perfectly defined goal to begin.

It’s completely normal to feel a little unsure about what to expect.

Therapy with me is conversational and collaborative. There will be space for you to talk and reflect, but I won’t simply sit back and expect you to carry the conversation. I’ll ask questions, help you notice patterns, offer perspective, and, when useful, share practical tools or explain what may be happening emotionally or in your nervous system.

You don’t need to prepare anything or know exactly where to begin. We’ll figure that out together.

That’s completely okay.

Some sessions begin with something very specific. Others begin with, “I don’t really know what I want to talk about today.”

You don’t have to arrive with an agenda or carry the conversation by yourself. Part of my role is to ask questions, help us slow things down, notice what’s coming up, and find a useful place to begin.

Usually, no — but that doesn’t mean I’ll leave you to figure everything out on your own.

I may offer another perspective, point out a pattern, teach a skill, ask a challenging question, or help you think through your options. But I don’t believe my role is to make decisions for you.

My goal is to help you understand yourself, your circumstances, and your choices more clearly so that the decisions you make feel like your own.

Sometimes earlier experiences help us understand why a present-day pattern makes sense, so your past may become relevant to our work. But therapy doesn’t have to involve endlessly analyzing your childhood.

We’ll focus on what is useful for understanding what’s happening in your life now. If looking backward helps us move forward, we can do that together — at a pace that feels manageable.

This is actually a common reason people come to therapy.

You may know why you react a certain way, recognize the pattern while it’s happening, and still find yourself unable to respond differently.

Insight is important, but it isn’t always enough. Our work can also focus on emotional and nervous-system regulation, practicing different responses, and working with experiences that may feel resolved intellectually but still carry an emotional or physical charge.

This is also where approaches such as Brainspotting may sometimes be helpful.

Sometimes you can understand something logically and still feel stuck emotionally.

You might know that you’re safe, understand why you developed a particular pattern, or recognize that something happened a long time ago — and yet your emotions or body continue to react as though nothing has changed.

Brainspotting is a therapeutic approach that uses focused awareness and eye position to help access and process experiences that may be held more deeply in the brain and body.

It isn’t something every client needs or chooses to use. If it seems relevant to what we’re working on, I’ll explain the process and we can decide together whether you’d like to try it.