Psychotherapy
Exploration and tools for people who want more than symptom management.
Sometimes the problem is clear: anxiety, low mood, grief, relationship conflict, sexual concerns, substance use, or difficulty coping.
Other times, something simply feels off.
You may understand your patterns intellectually and still find yourself caught in them. You may know what you should do and still struggle to do it. Or you may be trying to understand why the same emotions, relationships, conflicts, or fears continue to return.
Psychotherapy can offer a place to slow things down, become curious about what is happening, and develop different ways of responding.
This may be a good fit if...
- You tend to understand yourself intellectually but still feel stuck
- Anxiety, shame, anger, grief, or low mood are becoming difficult to carry
- The same patterns keep appearing in relationships, sex, work, or family life
- You want practical tools without reducing everything to a worksheet
- You are curious about how earlier relationships continue to shape the present
- Parts of your identity, culture, sexuality, faith, or family experience feel difficult to reconcile
- You want therapy that can hold complexity without rushing toward a diagnosis
- You want to understand not only what you do, but what the behaviour may be trying to accomplish
How I Work
My approach is integrative rather than tied to a single model. Different problems ask us to pay attention to different things. Depending on what we are exploring, our work may draw from four overlapping therapeutic traditions.
Psychoanalysis
Exploring the unconscious, early relationships, defenses, and recurring patterns that may continue to shape how you experience yourself and others.
Gestalt Therapy
Noticing what happens in the present moment—between thoughts, emotions, sensations, and relationships—to understand how you seek, avoid, interrupt, or sustain contact.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Following a more linear path from situations to thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, while identifying unhelpful thinking styles and experimenting with different responses.
Psychosexual Therapy
Exploring erotic templates, desire, intimacy, sexual expectations, and our ideas about how bodies are “supposed” to function, become aroused, and respond—both for ourselves and with partners.
We don't have to choose between insight and skills.
Sometimes therapy involves understanding where a pattern began.
Sometimes we notice what is happening between us in the room.
Sometimes we map the relationship between an event, thought, feeling, behaviour, and consequence.
And sometimes we question what we have learned about bodies, intimacy, masculinity, desirability, performance, relationships, or sex.
The approach can change depending on what the work requires.
What We Might Explore
These are not categories you need to fit into. They are some of the experiences and concerns that commonly enter the work.
Mood & Emotional Life
Anxiety, low mood, loneliness, anger, shame, self-criticism, emotional overwhelm, and difficulty understanding or expressing feelings.
Relationships & Intimacy
Dating, attachment, conflict, breakups, communication, rejection, jealousy, boundaries, dependence, avoidance, and recurring relationship patterns.
Sex, Desire & Body Image
Sexual confidence, desire, intimacy, arousal, erectile or orgasmic concerns, body image, sexual shame, racialized desire, compulsive patterns, and expectations about sexual functioning.
Identity, Culture & Belonging
Sexual orientation, gender, religion, migration, diaspora, family expectations, cultural conflict, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and reconciling different parts of yourself.
Coping & Behaviour Change
Substance use, self-harm, avoidance, excessive exercise or food monitoring, emotional coping, habits that no longer feel useful, and harm-reduction approaches to change.
Loss, Trauma & Transition
Grief, trauma, estrangement, endings, career uncertainty, changing relationships, major life transitions, and experiences that disrupt your sense of stability or identity.
Sometimes our “symptoms” are also strategies
What is this pattern trying to do for you?
Withdrawal may protect against rejection.
Control may make uncertainty feel more manageable.
Intense emotion may communicate something that has been difficult to put into words.
Overfunctioning may help keep relationships stable.
Avoidance may reduce fear in the short term even when it creates difficulty later.
Understanding a behaviour as adaptive does not mean we ignore its consequences. It gives us a more useful place from which to consider change.
When Connection Feels Dangerous
For people who long for connection but also experience closeness as risky. Explore mistrust, withdrawal, emotional distance, and protection around intimacy.
Related Reading →When Big Emotions Become Survival
For exploring emotional intensity, shame, impulsivity, relationship instability, and responses that may have developed as ways of surviving.
Related Reading →When Fear and Exhaustion Shape Personality
For thinking about anxiety, over-responsibility, perfectionism, control, avoidance, and the exhaustion that can accompany trying to keep life safe and predictable.
Therapy does not have to begin with a crisis.
You do not need to be at your worst to begin therapy.
Some people come because something is clearly wrong. Others come because they are curious about themselves, recognize a recurring pattern, are facing a transition, or realize that the way they have been coping no longer fits the life they want.
You may not even know exactly what the problem is.
That is enough to begin.
LGBTQ+
Mental Health
Queer and trans people often enter therapy carrying concerns that cannot be separated neatly into “individual psychology” and “social experience.”
Family rejection, minority stress, racism, body image, dating, sexual health, religion, gender expectations, and the lingering effects of discrimination can become part of how we understand ourselves.
My practice is queer- and trans-affirming, sex-positive, harm-reduction oriented, and attentive to the ways power and social context shape psychological life.
For some clients, it may also matter to know that I identify as gay, Muslim, and a person of colour.
The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys
A CBT-informed guide to queer mental health, minority stress, coping, identity, body image, relationships, sexuality, and challenging heteronormative and gendered expectations.
EXPLORE THE BOOKCBT without the thought police
Cognitive behavioural therapy is sometimes presented as if the therapist's job is to catch “bad thoughts” and replace them with better ones.
That is not how I use it.
CBT can help us slow down a sequence and become more precise about what happened, the meaning we gave it, what we felt, and what happened next.
The goal is not to force positive thinking.
Context matters. Culture matters. Power matters. Sometimes distress is not the result of distorted thinking—it is a reasonable response to something painful, unjust, or threatening.
Transcripts, Notes & Reflections from the CBT Dive Video Podcast
A look at CBT when it is relational, culturally responsive, emotionally alive, and anti-oppressive rather than mechanical—including reflections on thought records, behavioural experiments, exposure, behavioural activation, identity, power, and the therapeutic relationship.
Explore The CBT Dive →Sex, desire & psychosexual therapy
Sexual concerns are rarely only about anatomy.
Our expectations about sexual functioning are shaped by relationships, culture, pornography, gender, body image, aging, health, past experiences, shame, attraction, and the stories we have learned about what sex is “supposed” to look like.
Psychosexual work may involve exploring:
- Desire and differences in desire
- Arousal and sexual response
- Erectile or orgasmic concerns
- Sexual anxiety and performance pressure
- Body image and self-consciousness
- Erotic templates and fantasies
- Shame, avoidance, or fear around sex
- Communication with partners
- Sexual expectations within relationships
- The relationship between emotional safety and erotic life
The goal is not to determine whether you are performing sex “correctly.” It is to better understand the relationship you have with desire, your body, pleasure, intimacy, expectations, and other people.
What therapy with me is like
Will you give me homework?
Sometimes. If structured exercises, reflection questions, behavioural experiments, reading, or skill practice seem useful, we may use them. But therapy is not built around completing worksheets correctly.
Will we talk about childhood?
Possibly. Earlier relationships often help us understand present patterns, but we do not need to turn every difficulty into a childhood explanation.
Will you challenge me?
Yes, when it seems useful. Challenge does not have to mean confrontation. It can mean becoming curious about contradictions, noticing something you may be avoiding, or asking whether an explanation still fits.
What if I don't know what to talk about?
That's fine. Silence, uncertainty, confusion, and “I don't know” can all become useful parts of therapy.
Is therapy with you structured or open-ended?
Both are possible. Some people benefit from focused short-term work around a specific problem. Others want space to explore broader themes and recurring patterns over time.
Who I Work With
Adolescents
Support around mood, identity, relationships, sexuality, family dynamics, coping, and life transitions.
Adults
Short- or longer-term psychotherapy addressing emotional, relational, behavioural, sexual, identity, and life concerns.
Older Adults
Therapy addressing relationships, identity, sexuality, loss, transition, changing roles, aging, and meaning.
About the therapeutic relationship
Therapy is not something that only happens inside you.
It also happens between us.
At times, the ways you expect other people to respond may begin to appear in the therapeutic relationship. You may worry about being judged, misunderstood, disappointing me, being too much, needing too much, saying the wrong thing, or losing control of how you are perceived.
Rather than treating those moments as distractions, we can sometimes use them as information.
The therapy relationship can become one place to notice a pattern while it is happening—and experiment with something different.
Sessions
Individual psychotherapy sessions are typically offered virtually.
Therapy may be:
- Short-term and focused
- Periodic or as-needed
- Longer-term and exploratory
The focus and frequency of therapy can be discussed collaboratively.
Scope
Psychotherapy is distinct from my:
- Clinical consultation and supervision
- Organizational consulting
- Professional practice and project consultation
- Speaking and training services
If you are unsure which service fits what you are looking for, you are welcome to ask.
Optional reading between sessions
Some clients appreciate having language, exercises, or reflection material to continue thinking between sessions. Others prefer therapy to stay entirely in the room. Both are fine.
The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys
CBT-informed tools, queer mental health, minority stress, coping, identity, relationships, and sexuality.
Related Reading →The CBT Dive
A relational and anti-oppressive approach to CBT in actual clinical work.
Related Reading →When Connection Feels Dangerous
Withdrawal, mistrust, intimacy, and the tension between wanting connection and protecting yourself from it.
Related Reading →When Big Emotions Become Survival
Emotional intensity, shame, reactivity, relationship instability, and patterns organized around survival.
Related Reading →A note on diagnosis
Diagnosis can sometimes provide useful language, access to treatment, or a framework for understanding what someone is experiencing.
It can also flatten complicated experiences into categories.
Where diagnosis is relevant, I try to remain attentive to both: what a clinical framework helps us understand and what it may fail to capture about your relationships, history, identities, environment, and ways of surviving.
What are we trying to change?
UNDERSTAND
What is happening?
NOTICE
When and how does it happen?
EXPERIMENT
What becomes possible if we respond differently?
Therapy does not require becoming a completely different person. Often the work is about gaining more freedom in how you respond—to yourself, to other people, and to circumstances that once seemed to leave you with only one option.
Ready to start the work?
You do not need to know exactly what you want to work on before reaching out. We can begin by talking about what is bringing you to therapy and whether working together seems like a useful fit.
BOOK AN INITIAL CONSULTATION