Services
Psychotherapy
Here are a few of many reasons why people choose counselling. You might be:
Re-living past incidents that bring you fear and anxiety, dissatisfied with your relationships, unable to have restful sleep, work or food for 'no reason', looking for a safe space to discuss sexual concerns, wondering about your 'purpose in life' and pursuit of ‘happiness’, grieving the loss of someone/something significant, concerned about your use of alcohol or drugs, burnt out and living life on autopilot, feeling anxious while scrolling through social media, wanting to treat a diagnoses, or simply wanting to see what therapy is about.
Whatever variation of the reason there may be, accepting that you or your relationships need help is not always easy. And then, comes an even tougher challenge - asking for help.
Asking for help doesn’t mean you (or your relationships) are weak, it means that you want to remain strong. As tough as it might be, it reflects your wisdom of your own resiliency and when you need to nurture it, despite the fear of shame, stigma or ridicule.
Click here to meet the team.
Individual Counselling
Mental health challenges can often be like the age-old riddle of "What came first, the egg or the chicken?".
"Does depression give me anxiety or does anxiety make me depressed?",
"Is a lack of sexual drive affecting my relationship or is my relationship killing my drive?"
Although a clinical list of signs and symptoms of various diagnoses does exist, everyone's experience of them is unique. Mental health challenges are rarely ever linear - more like an ever-entangling mental ball of strings, the more you tug on, the tighter it gets. That is why it is commendable that you are here and exploring what you can do to help yourself.
In individual therapy, we work together on understanding what is going on in the easiest, most effective, harm-reductive way - one that works for you. We then practice coping and how to maintain healthy coping in the long run. Here are a few areas we specialize in:
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Anxiety: Social & Social Media Anxiety, Acculturation Stress (adjusting in a new culture), Overcoming "Creative Block" and burnout, PTSD
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Learning Challenges: ADHD, Autism, navigating their challenges as an adult
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Trauma: Grief & Loss, Abuse and/or assault
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Identity Exploration: Developing understanding and acceptance of self, expression, gender, body image, personality, values, sexual orientation.
Get in touch to book your free 20-minute phone consultation.
Relationship therapy makes room for more people to enter the therapy space together. It allows loved ones to work as a team to overcome communication hurdles, rejuvenate connections and intimacy while promoting self-awareness and personal growth. Relationships, especially when in transition, can pose stressful challenges and collaterally impact others connected to their relationship - like children, parents, colleagues, common-friends.
We work with the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy (by Dr. Ellyn Bader and Pete Pearson) that addresses growth as a complex process. It allows for each person in the relationship to develop individually while also working on developing the relationship as a unit.
Relationship therapy also addresses concerns related to sex and sexuality as an essential part of the relationship. There are no taboos within our therapy space and I welcome people and relationships from all genders, orientations, religions, ethnicities, and forms of expression. Our sessions would be inclusive, affirming, culture-sensitive, polyamoury-friendly, kink & BDSM-friendly, non-pathologizing, and non-awkward (ask us about the blend of Sex + Art Therapy).
No two relationships look alike and relationship therapy applies beyond traditional Couples Therapy. It encapsulates family relationships (parent-child, siblings) or pretty much any relationship that is a priority and might need additional support.
Got questions? Ask us here and we can schedule your 20-minute free phone consultation.
If you notice your family having the same conflict over and over again, or.. if you notice generational patterns repeating themselves in a way that definitely does not serve you anymore, family therapy may be for you.
When one member of a family presents with a mental health issue, it is often just the tip of the iceberg. In other words, because we are so closely influenced by the people we are born amongst and those that we grow up with, our chapter is only an opening to the story of the rest of the family. Although the family may come from one home, each individual member will have a different experience of being.
Family Therapy is a space where you can bring in your multi-layered complex dynamics, and overcome conflict. With the help of an experienced counsellor, focused on rebuilding the unit while helping you reconnect with your individual strengths and identity, you can learn to heal relationship breakdowns in a way that makes sense to each individual member. Sounds too good to be true? All the more reason for you to try.
No two families function alike and coping with life challenges like extended family ruptures, caregiver burnout, gender and identity expression-based conflicts, parenting style mismatch, intergenerational trauma, loss of a family member, separation, divorce, remarriage, intercultural or blended family dynamic clashes, relocation, anger management, domestic abuse, cultural adjustment and generational miscommunication can get all the more difficult when being dealt with alone. This also increases pressure on parents to be able to successfully steer the ship through unknown waters - something they do not have to do alone, let alone, be good at! It may also increase shame and guilt in kids when acting towards or reacting to the conflict - leading to unhealthy ways of coping that extend way beyond their behaviour at home. This is why our family counsellors tailor their expertise (examples of approaches - Developmental Model, Internal Family Systems (IFS), etc) to fit your family's specific needs.
Family therapy is your opportunity to break intergenerational cycles of hurt and create ones of healing to pass on to future generations.
Got questions? Ask us here and we can schedule your 20-minute free phone consultation with a family counsellor on our team.
♫ We can get there faster if we all move together... ♫
(Move Together · Ndidi Onukwulu)
If individual/relationship counselling isn't quite an option for you at the moment (emotionally, financially, practically..), group therapy can be a great place to start therapeutic work. It also helps keep the momentum going when combined with 1-on-1 therapy. Learning, developing and exploring as a group, under the facilitation of a counsellor, has been known to provide a safe space for all members (usually 5-8) to exchange unique experiences of dealing with a similar challenge.
Groups run on demand and interest and carry an integration of art-based directives. If you'd like to know more or join, let us know of your interest below.
Online counselling through video-chat or call is the easiest way to keep the good work going even when schedules or time zones don't align. Not to mention, counselling is most effective when paired with consistency. The aim of online counselling is also to help make mental health services more available and accessible around the world, now more than ever. So if you would like to get counselling, don't let physical distance keep you from it. Ask us here about how we can set this up in a way that works best for you, your currency and your location.
Languages: English, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish, conversation Punjabi.
Art can permeate the deepest parts of us - where no words exist.
– Eileen Miller
Art Therapy combines art and psychotherapy in a creative process using the image created as a starting point for self-exploration and understanding.
Working with art has been particularly effective in dealing with trauma. It relieves stress, encourages creative thinking, increases brain plasticity, and imparts other mental health benefits - like navigating dreams, nightmares and memories.
Also, anyone can do art - no artistic skills/experience required.
We work with symbols, metaphors, shapes, colours to begin conversation or a sensory experience that taps into a deeper vocabulary of understanding of how we feel.
Art therapy can help in visualizing and interacting with a problem, as separate from the client, so we can then develop a relationship with it. Art therapy can also help create safety and structure for the topics we discuss in session.
Ask your counsellor what this would look like in session here.
The impact of trauma can vary from person to person.
However, our bodies store or absorb the traumatic experience as learned memory to protect us in the future. The body exercises this protection by automatically going into a fight, flight, or freeze response. This response is stored in the nervous system as a stress response (protective measure), even when potential threats have been resolved or we don't need to continue to protect ourselves anymore.
Survivors can often experience long-term effects after trauma due to the nervous system exercising its protective measures such as nightmares, hyperarousal, hypervigilance, numbness, dissociation, and emotional dysregulation on a regular basis.
What signifies a certified trauma-informed yoga practitioner is their sensitivity to trauma and teaching yoga as a healing practice. Through incorporating trauma-informed yoga within psychotherapy, the practitioner creates a safe and supportive space where clients can learn more about how their nervous system has been impacted and access points to relieve bodily fear association through hand yoga, meditations, breathing control, intuitive movement and grounding.
Trauma-informed yoga has worked very well with emotional self-regulation, increased body regulation and developing a deeper connection with self.
To know more, ask your practitioner here.
Diet & Nutrition Coaching
Did you know that what you eat can not only impact your physical but also your mental health?
Studies have found that a poor diet (with high levels of saturated fat, refined carbohydrates and processed food products) is linked to poorer mental health in children, adolescents and adults. As a result of this impact, immunity along with overall mental wellbeing drops significantly as we grow older. To explain this further, we will borrow words from Dr. Drew Ramsey, MD, Columbia University -
"the risk of depression increases about 80% when you compare teens with the lowest-quality diet, or what we call the "Western diet", to those who eat a higher-quality, whole-foods diet. The risk of attention-deficit disorder (ADD) doubles".
Some of you may also know of our popular little friend - the hippocampus, which is a tiny curved structure in our brain, responsible for helping create new neurons (brain cells) that also regulate mood and cognition. The hippocampus's ability to perform neurogenesis gets highly impacted by stress among other factors like aging, high fat diets, high sugar diets, alcohol and opioids. So when someone gets prescribed antidepressants, it is to help the hippocampus maintain that process which has been impacted by symptoms of depression. Even if all this sounds like medical jargon that may, in turn, be causing you more stress now, we cannot deny the importance that a healthy diet (a diet healthy for you - specifically) can do to increase your brains ability to regulate your emotions and mood.
If you agree with Dr. Ramsey, you'll know that "diet is potentially the most powerful intervention we have. By helping people shape their diets, we can improve their mental health and decrease their risk of psychiatric disorders".
If you need help figuring out your food habits for a mental health goal or a physical ailment/fitness goal, schedule a free consult with our Diet and Nutrition Coach.
Get in touch to inquire more.
KINESIOLOGY & PERSONAL TRAINING
Kinesiology and physical training can improve your overall relationship between mind and body.
A Kinesiologist can help you set fitness goals and achieve them in a sustainable way, that actually lasts. They can also help you cope with physical injuries or manage, rehabilitate, and prevent physical and mental disorders that hold up proper body movement or prevent you from having a safe and enjoyable experience of living in your body.
Our blend of Kinesiology and Personal Training can help address goals ranging from fat loss and physical fitness, to body image issues, improved posture, post-traumatic pain, body-aches, staying active, depression, anxiety, obesity and diagnosed health issues. It can help address physical symptoms (like pain, fatigue, etc) of mental challenges (like stress, anxiety, etc).
Ask us how we can help you move better with a 20-minute free phone consultation.
Click here to meet the team.
