Individual Therapy in Vancouver
You don’t have to have it all figured out.
Sometimes you know exactly what you want help with. Other times, you just know that something isn’t working. You might be stuck in the same relationship patterns, feeling more anxious or depleted than usual, having a hard time with something from your past, or realizing that the way you’ve been getting through life isn’t working as well as it used to.
Individual therapy gives you somewhere to slow things down, make sense of what’s happening, and figure out what you actually need.
You don’t need to know where to start.
You might come to therapy because...
Maybe you’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about yourself. You understand where some of your patterns come from and can probably explain them pretty well. The frustrating part is that understanding something doesn’t always change how you feel or what happens when you’re actually in it.
You might be looking for support with:
Anxiety, overthinking, and feeling like your mind rarely switches off
Relationship patterns, boundaries, people-pleasing, or putting other people’s needs ahead of your own
Burnout, emotional exhaustion, or feeling like you’re just going through the motions
ADHD, autism, or making sense of yourself after a late diagnosis or realization
Intrusive thoughts, OCD, reassurance-seeking, or getting stuck trying to feel certain
Trauma, difficult past experiences, or reactions that don’t always make sense in the present
Depression, low mood, or feeling disconnected from yourself and the things you usually care about
Grief, identity, life transitions, stress, or simply feeling unsure about what comes next
You don’t need to fit neatly into one of these categories. Most people don’t.
What individual therapy with me is like
Therapy with me is collaborative and curious. I’m not going to sit silently while you do all the talking, but I’m also not going to tell you how to live your life. We’ll try to understand what’s happening together.
Sometimes that means talking through something that happened during your week. Other times, we might slow down and pay attention to what comes up while we’re talking, notice a familiar reaction as it happens, or get curious about a part of you that seems to want one thing while another part wants something completely different.
We may also look at where certain patterns came from. The ways you cope, relate to people, respond to conflict, or talk to yourself usually developed for a reason. Understanding that history can be useful, but we won’t spend all our time analyzing the past. I’m interested in how those experiences are affecting your life now and what might help you have more choice going forward.
Depending on what brings you to therapy, I draw from approaches including Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, attachment-focused and emotion-focused therapy. You don’t need to know what any of those mean before you come in. We’ll use what is useful for you rather than trying to fit you into a particular model.
More than insight
Many of the people I work with are already pretty self-aware. They’ve read the books, listened to the podcasts, been to therapy before, or spent a lot of time trying to understand themselves.
Insight matters. But there can be a frustrating gap between knowing why you do something and being able to respond differently when the pattern actually shows up.
Our work can include understanding the pattern, but we’ll also pay attention to what happens underneath it. What are you feeling? What are you afraid might happen? What does some part of you believe it needs to do right now? What changes when you don’t immediately follow the familiar response?
Over time, therapy can become less about figuring out what’s “wrong” and more about knowing yourself well enough to make choices that actually fit you.
Therapy looks different for everyone, but over time you may develop:
✷ A clearer understanding of the patterns that keep showing up in your life
✷ More awareness of what you feel, want, and need
✷ More ability to stay with difficult emotions without immediately trying to fix, avoid, or explain them away
✷ Greater confidence setting boundaries and making decisions that work for you
✷ Less shame about the ways you’ve learned to cope
✷ More trust in yourself when something feels difficult, uncertain, or unfamiliar
The goal isn’t to become perfectly regulated, endlessly productive, or unaffected by difficult things. It’s to understand yourself better and have more choice in how you respond to your life.