I didn’t start out as a mental health therapist. After my BSW from University of Victoria, I worked in rural transgender community health and harm reduction. Doing that work, I got to meet queer and trans people from all over the place, mostly small towns and rural areas. Often, I was the first trans person my clients had ever met, outside of themself and maybe the internet. 

I loved that job, but I met queer people every day who believed that the trauma they had gone through in their lives was like a death sentence. Recovering from Complex PSTD seemed like a far-off dream or impossible, something only for wealthy cisgender heterosexual city-dwellers.

After COVID lockdowns turned the heat up on the rural mental health epidemic, I knew I needed to learn how to take on trauma seriously. I went back to university, and became a certified Forest & Nature Therapy Guide at the same time so that my ADHD-brain could have an outlet from the endless Zoom calls. I also connected to my own spiritual practices, tarot and astrology (which I take both whimsically and seriously), to ground me through my Saturn Return.

After my MSW from University of Calgary, I trained in EMDR with the intention of doing trauma work that can work fast and make permanent positive change. (It definitely worked on me.) I mentored under an Internal Family Systems therapist because parts work helped me see the strange magic in my own inner landscape more vividly than anything else. I trained in Relational Life Therapy because I loved the way that it takes trauma work out of the silo of individual therapy and makes it possible for people to actually heal in relationship with the others they love most.