Work with me
Now accepting new clients
Psychotherapy
Exploration and tools for people who want more than symptom management.
Individual sessions for adolescents, adults, and older adults, typically offered virtually.
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 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're 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. We don't have to choose between insight and skills: depending on what we're exploring, the work may draw from four overlapping traditions, and the approach can change as the work requires.
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Psychoanalysis
Exploring the unconscious, early relationships, defences, and recurring patterns that may continue to shape how you experience yourself and others.
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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.
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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.
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Psychosexual therapy
Exploring erotic templates, desire, intimacy, sexual expectations, and ideas about how bodies are “supposed” to function, become aroused, and respond.
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.
What we might explore
These aren't categories you need to fit into. They're some of the experiences and concerns that commonly enter the work.
Mood and emotional life
Anxiety, low mood, loneliness, anger, shame, self-criticism, emotional overwhelm, and difficulty understanding or expressing feelings.
Relationships and intimacy
Dating, attachment, conflict, breakups, communication, rejection, jealousy, boundaries, dependence, avoidance, and recurring relationship patterns.
Sex, desire, and body image
Sexual confidence, desire, arousal, erectile or orgasmic concerns, body image, sexual shame, racialized desire, compulsive patterns, and expectations about sexual functioning.
Identity, culture, and belonging
Sexual orientation, gender, religion, migration, diaspora, family expectations, cultural conflict, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and reconciling different parts of yourself.
Coping and behaviour change
Substance use, self-harm, avoidance, excessive exercise or food monitoring, habits that no longer feel useful, and harm-reduction approaches to change.
Loss, trauma, and transition
Grief, trauma, estrangement, endings, career uncertainty, changing relationships, and major transitions that disrupt your sense of stability or identity.
LGBTQ+ mental health
Queer and trans people often enter therapy carrying concerns that can't 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.
More about how I work
Sometimes “symptoms” are also strategies
A useful question is: 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 doesn't mean we ignore its consequences. It gives us a more useful place from which to consider change.
CBT without the thought police
CBT is sometimes presented as if the therapist's job is to catch “bad thoughts” and replace them with better ones. That isn't 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: event → interpretation → emotion → response.
The goal isn't to force positive thinking. Context matters. Culture matters. Power matters. Sometimes distress isn't the result of distorted thinking; it's a reasonable response to something painful, unjust, or threatening.
Sex, desire, and psychosexual therapy
Sexual concerns are rarely only about anatomy. Our expectations are shaped by relationships, culture, pornography, gender, body image, aging, health, past experiences, shame, attraction, and the stories we've 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
- Emotional safety and erotic life
The goal isn't to decide whether you're performing sex “correctly.” It's to better understand your relationship with desire, your body, pleasure, intimacy, expectations, and other people.
The therapeutic relationship
Therapy isn't something that only happens inside you. It also happens between us.
At times, the ways you expect other people to respond may 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're perceived.
Rather than treating those moments as distractions, we can use them as information. The relationship can become one place to notice a pattern while it's happening, and experiment with something different.
A note on diagnosis
Diagnosis can 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 stay 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 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 isn't built around completing worksheets correctly.
Will we talk about childhood?
Possibly. Earlier relationships often help us understand present patterns, but we don't need to turn every difficulty into a childhood explanation.
Will you challenge me?
Yes, when it seems useful. Challenge doesn't 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.
Practical details
Who I work with
- Adolescents
- Mood, identity, relationships, sexuality, family dynamics, coping, and transitions.
- Adults
- Short- or longer-term work on emotional, relational, behavioural, sexual, and identity concerns.
- Older adults
- Relationships, identity, sexuality, loss, changing roles, aging, and meaning.
Sessions
Individual sessions are typically offered virtually. Therapy may be short-term and focused, periodic or as-needed, or longer-term and exploratory. We decide the focus and frequency together.
Something else?
Psychotherapy is separate from my other services. Not sure which fits? You're welcome to ask.
Optional reading between sessions
Some clients like having language, exercises, or reflection material between sessions. Others prefer therapy to stay in the room. Both are fine.
The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys
CBT-informed tools for minority stress, coping, identity, body image, relationships, and sexuality.
The CBT Dive
CBT that is relational, culturally responsive, and anti-oppressive rather than mechanical.
When Connection Feels Dangerous
Mistrust, withdrawal, and the tension between wanting closeness and protecting yourself from it.
When Big Emotions Become Survival
Emotional intensity, shame, impulsivity, and responses that developed as ways of surviving.
When Fear and Exhaustion Shape Personality
Anxiety, over-responsibility, perfectionism, control, and the exhaustion of keeping life predictable.
Therapy doesn't have to begin with a crisis.
Some people come because something is clearly wrong. Others come because they're curious about themselves, recognize a recurring pattern, are facing a transition, or realize the way they've been coping no longer fits the life they want. You don't need to know exactly what you want to work on. That's enough to begin.
We can start by talking about what's bringing you to therapy and whether working together seems like a useful fit.