Learning through practice and community
My counselling and psychotherapy work has taken me into primary health care, family health teams, university settings, shelter-based emergency mental health services, and rural and northern communities. Each setting has offered different ways of understanding what people need and what can make care easier or harder to access. These experiences continue to shape how I listen, build relationships, and approach my work.
Living and working in rural northern Canada, including work with Indigenous communities, has been an important part of my professional life. This experience informs my attention to culture, place, and power, and reminds me to keep examining the assumptions I bring into a room. I see learning from people and communities, and remaining accountable in those relationships, as ongoing responsibilities.
Over time, my practice has grown toward a trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, queer-affirming, and neurodivergent-affirming approach. I care about creating space for the complexity of being human. I want people to feel that their experiences can be met with curiosity and compassion, and that they have a voice in what healing and change might look like for them.
Doctoral education and professional formation
I hold a Doctor of Education in Counselling Psychology from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. My doctoral education is one part of a much longer learning journey, alongside the people I have worked with, the students I have taught, and the questions that continue to challenge and interest me.
I am a Registered Psychotherapist and a Canadian Certified Counsellor-Supervisor (CCC-S). I continue to learn through professional development, reflection, and practice. My integrative clinical work draws on Internal Family Systems, EMDR, somatic approaches, and narrative therapy. I bring these approaches into conversation with each person’s needs, preferences, and circumstances.
Teaching counsellors to think, reflect, and respond
As a full-time professor at Yorkville University, I help prepare graduate students for the work of counselling. My teaching has included biopsychosocial approaches, counselling interventions, and practicum education. As course lead for the Biopsychosocial course, I also contribute to curriculum that helps students connect psychological knowledge with people’s social and cultural lives.
I enjoy helping students connect ideas with the real experiences they encounter in practice. I invite them to be curious about how they understand a person’s story, whose perspectives they draw on, and how their own experiences shape their responses. Ethics, cultural responsiveness, social justice, and the thoughtful use of research are woven into that learning.
I also enjoy the creative work of building a course: choosing readings, developing activities, writing lesson plans, and designing assignments that help learning come alive. I pay particular attention to Canadian contexts and scholarship, and to giving students opportunities to practise, reflect, and develop their own professional judgment.
Clinical supervision as relational and ethical work
Clinical supervision is a part of my work that I care deeply about. I support counsellors and psychotherapists as they think through their practice, develop confidence, and find their own professional voice. Together, we explore clinical questions, ethical responsibilities, and the ways our histories and social locations enter the work we do with others.
I provide clinical supervision for Registered Psychotherapists (Qualifying), meeting the relevant CRPO supervisor requirements, and offer consultation to clinical supervisors. I aim to make these relationships supportive and honest, with room for growth alongside clear attention to client care and professional accountability.
I want supervision to be a place where people can bring uncertainty, ask questions, and have conversations that may feel difficult elsewhere. Feedback, consent, evaluation, boundaries, difference, and power all deserve thoughtful attention. I am interested in helping supervisors use their authority with care while staying open to what they, too, have to learn.
The Empowered Supervisor
The Empowered Supervisor brings together my experience as a therapist, educator, and supervisor. Through this work, I create learning opportunities for people who support other practitioners. My aim is to help supervisors develop an approach that feels thoughtful, grounded, and connected to the responsibilities of their role.
I am continuing to develop the 36-hour foundational curriculum, including its revision into a 10-week structure. The course explores supervisory relationships, feminist and anti-oppressive perspectives, agreements and informed consent, evaluation, ethics, power, and supervisor sustainability. These topics create opportunities for supervisors to reflect on who they are in their work and how they want to support others.
Building spaces for healing and learning
My psychotherapy and supervision practice, Heal 2, and The Empowered Supervisor give me different ways to bring care and learning into the world. I value being able to move between working directly with people, supporting practitioners, and creating educational spaces where we can think and grow together.
Heal 2 is also becoming a self-led course for counsellors and psychotherapists. It makes room for the person behind the helping role: our histories, identities, patterns, and ongoing healing. In developing this course, I am exploring how those of us who care for others can also make space for our own experience, integration, and learning.
Lived experience and professional perspective
My work is also shaped by being a queer, neurodivergent person who came to understand my lesbian identity and neurodivergence later in life. Coming to know myself in these ways has deepened my interest in identity, belonging, and the possibilities that can open when we begin to understand our lives differently.
I bring this lived experience into my work with care and respect for the fact that every person’s story is their own. It strengthens my commitment to spaces where people can explore who they are and what matters to them. My interests in trauma, embodiment, awakening, and self-understanding are connected to this curiosity about how we make meaning and find our way.
An emerging research direction
Transformative Clinical Supervision is the focus of the research program I am developing for 2027–2031. It brings together critical, relational, and embodied perspectives to explore questions that have grown out of my practice and teaching: How does supervision shape us? How do we work thoughtfully with power? What helps professional learning become meaningful change?
This emerging direction offers a way to bring my clinical experience, supervisor education, curriculum work, and research interests together. I am especially interested in trauma stewardship, embodied awareness, professional resilience, and how social justice can be expressed in the everyday relationships through which practitioners learn.
The work I am carrying forward
Whatever role I am in, I keep returning to the care and responsibility involved in helping. I hope my work supports practitioners who are curious, thoughtful, and willing to keep learning—people who can bring both skill and humanity to the relationships entrusted to them.
My life’s work is still unfolding. It lives in the conversations I have with clients, the questions students bring, the relationships built in supervision, and the ideas that become new courses and research. I want to keep making space for learning, connection, and care that is responsive, affirming, and just.