Ways of doing
Whether you're navigating relationship challenges, processing grief, or wanting to understand patterns that keep showing up in your life—counselling offers space to explore what matters most to you. My approach combines systemic understanding (seeing the bigger picture of your patterns) with creative, embodied methods that access insights beyond talk alone.Before counselling, I spent 20 years as a visual and performing artist. This background shapes how I work—integrating systemic approaches with embodied, creative methods that access insights beyond traditional talk therapy.
Individual Work
What We Explore: Your values, needs, and what truly matters to you. Relationship patterns that feel stuck or repetitive. Family dynamics and how they shape your current connections. Grief and loss (including life transitions, cultural displacement, relationship endings). Parts of yourself that feel in conflict.
How We Work: I use Transactional Analysis to understand power dynamics and fixed roles in relationships, your Life Script (the unconscious patterns learned in childhood), and Family Constellations to see the balance in your family system. We also work with different parts of yourself through parts work, helping you understand internal conflicts and find integration.
We rehearse potential scenarios—practicing new ways of communicating or being in relationships before you face them in real life. This means you leave sessions with actual tools and practiced responses, not just insights.
Couples Work
What We Address: Communication breakdowns, power dynamics, recurring conflicts, feeling disconnected during stress, cycles that create distance, expressing needs without escalating conflict.
How We Work: Using Transactional Analysis (Ego States, Life Positions, Drama Triangle), we map the patterns playing out between you. NVC helps you handle conflict responsibly—communicating in ways the other can actually hear while taking responsibility for your own needs and feelings. Family Constellations reveals how each partner's family patterns show up in your relationship.
We apply these tools to your current challenges—working with real situations you're facing. This means practicing actual conversations, understanding what triggers each of you, and building new patterns together in the session.
Creative & Somatic Approaches
What This Includes: Somatic work with visualizations and breathing to access body wisdom and regulate your nervous system. Observational practices that help you notice patterns as they happen. Writing exercises exploring personal histories—your relationship to money, symptoms, life patterns, family narratives.
Why This Matters: Sometimes our minds know what we "should" do, but our bodies hold different information. These methods help you access insights your analytical mind alone might miss—connecting you to felt sense, intuition, and embodied knowing. This is where my artistic background directly informs the work.
What to Expect in Sessions
First Session (90 minutes): We explore what brings you here through open questions—learning about your life, your relationships, your family background, and the contexts that have shaped you. The focus is on understanding your world, getting to know you as a whole person.
In the last 30 minutes, we work together to brainstorm 10 guiding questions that speak to what you actually need from this work. These questions come from you—what you've shared, what feels important, what keeps showing up. We choose one question together to guide your trajectory. This becomes your anchor throughout our work.
Ongoing Sessions (60 minutes): We bring your guiding question into the session and explore it deeply. What are you experiencing in relation to this? What have you already tried? When have similar situations worked out differently in your life? What are you already doing that works, even partially?
This exploration reveals your existing resources and sense of possibility—you're not starting from zero. From there, we create an action plan to try things out in real life. Sessions are about discovery and practice, not just talking about problems.
Frequency: Most clients start weekly, then shift to bi-weekly as patterns become clearer and you're actively practicing between sessions. Some prefer intensive weekly work followed by monthly check-ins.