Oh, no — absolutely not! Read what feels necessary and just leave the rest — anything essential that you’ve skipped will come up through the informed consent process, if we meet. Some folx require a lot of information to feel safe enough to reach out; others prefer to take in key pieces to get a holistic impression of the person, practitioner, and process. Some clients want to hear about the praxis (the reciprocal cycle of theory, action, and reflection) supporting the therapeutic relationship and work; some hearts ache for the poetry of it all; everyone needs to sense that their therapist will make and hold the right type of space and really, genuinely care. Of course, this is a tricky balance to negotiate in (almost) static text! Hopefully, you’ll connect with the ways I’ve worked to tend to these and other important considerations.

On my end, I’ve laid out my practice approach and structure in explicit depth and breadth as an action of transparency — because this is integral to nurturing radical ethicism, trust, collaboration, safeness, feedback, and accountability: the very bedrock of healing. I also want to preemptively ‘give away’ the information that comes up in a general consultation, so we can focus much more on your specific curiosities, circumstances, intentions, and expectations if we meet, and then dive right into the work with our intake session.

All this said, I do ask that you read enough to sense that we could be a beautiful fit (across all the dimensions that are important to you), as this will enable me to continue offering no cost, full-hour consultations. Collective care and sustainability are in complex interrelationship here (as they are everywhere)…

March 2024 update: Please note that I am not currently seeing clients or booking consults, but plan to be in early 2024!

***

At this time — in continuing contribution to collective health, safety, and care — all appointments take place virtually over a secure, PHIPA- and PIPEDA-compliant application. I’ll provide full details about the virtual appointment process during our initial email exchange/phone call.

I so look forward to the day we can safely share close quarters again!

usra: ‘Us’ as in ‘you and I’, ‘rah’ as in the Egyptian sun god ‘Ra’ or the cheerleader chant ‘Rah! Rah! Rah!’, with the emphasis on the first syllable (and a slight roll of the ‘R’, if so inclined). It’s a Muslim name of Arabic origin with multiple meanings in Urdu (the Indian/Pakistani language my family speaks) — including ‘generous’, ‘nobler’, and ‘to travel by night’.

leedham: LEE-dum.

My full name is usra travella wite bii leedham.

Listen to me saying my full name here!

As a Registered Social Worker (RSW #836430), I am licensed to practice psychotherapy and social work with anyone located in Ontario, Canada. You can confirm my registration by searching for my name — usra leedham — or registration number in the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers Online Register.

I work out of an office in my home, in the Junction area of Toronto, Ontario. Please see the Location page for full details!

Unfortunately, my physical office is not mobility device accessible, as it’s on the second floor of my home and there are stairs leading up to the front door (more necessary follow-up on how I address this inaccessibility in a moment).

Our rescue mini dachshund, Herbie, lives on premises (obligatory photo, below!). While — like all sausage dogs — he generally believes he owns the joint (and isn’t wrong), he is in his bed on the first floor during our appointments (unless you’d like him to be in the room with us), and produces very little dander as a 12-pounder with a smooth coat.

In all cases where my office arrangement creates barriers to accessibility, we’ll work together to ensure not only access, but the best possible therapeutic experience.

At this time, due to COVID — and with acknowledgment that this is an imperfect solution — I only provide virtual therapy. In non-COVID times, in-person alternatives can (and must) be as responsive and creative as time and space allow! For example, if you live within an approximately 15-minute commute from me (one way by foot, bike, or car), we can arrange to meet in your home. Weather and therapeutic process permitting, I provide outdoor — moving or place-based — psychotherapy in Etienne Brulé park (otherwise called ‘walk and talk therapy’ or ecotherapy). I also provide bedside therapy in home, hospital, long term care, hospice, and palliative settings. There is no difference in fees for any of these alternatives (or any others we may decide on) — this is facilitated through my interdependent fee structure. More information regarding these options — all of which require nuanced and specific dialogue around unique issues of confidentiality and feasibility — will be made available as soon as they resume!

I build my practice schedule in response to client availability, my continuing education and extra-practice life-work commitments, and my accountability to providing radically ethical care that meets each client’s specific needs in collective context — with acknowledgment that these considerations shift across time.

I know how tough it can be to find evening and weekend appointments — these do tend to fill up fast, but I’ve weighted my hours towards making as many as possible available. As of March 2024, I have a number of openings Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays between the hours of 2:00-8:00pm. We can discuss exact availabilities during our consultation or don’t hesitate to reach out if your schedule is tight and you’d like to ensure we’ll be able to find a time slot that works for you before we meet for a consultation!

Standing appointment slots are encouraged as they help to support consistency and preparation in service of trust, focus, and momentum; wherever possible, I try not to book these back-to-back between clients. I generally offer consultations on Wednesdays between 2:00-8:00pm, though we can absolutely arrange for another day and time if this can’t work for you! Cancellation reschedules are usually booked on Wednesdays or Thursdays — but, again, there’s flexibility here depending on my active client roster and what’s happening week-to-week.

Of course! I’ll continue to offer virtual therapy even after I return to in-person practice as a means of facilitating access and flexibility for all (potential) clients. Folx may also choose to attend a combination of virtual and in-person sessions, depending on what’s happening in their lives week-to-week.

I offer a free, 60-minute consultation session (usually in person, but virtual at this time due to COVID). Please see the Therapy Process page for full details!

Because this choice matters. The therapeutic relationship is the very ground from which this form of healing begins — always, but particularly in relational-experiential practice. You need to find the right practitioner — and person — to feel and sense and think and work and change with…this may or may not be me.

Because how can I invite you (back) into the possibilities of slow, resonant, present work without contributing to the spaciousness for it?

Because the search for a therapist — after making the already risky and often complex decision to reach out for support — is hard enough. It demands so much energy, so much research, so much consideration, so much exposure. It can be utterly overwhelming and exhausting at a time when what we need most — right now — is to reconnect with responsiveness, stability, and hope…when feeling anything close might be especially difficult.

Because I am with you in beloved community — whether or not we work together, whether or not you pay me.

Because we deserve so much more than the heart-breaking, soul-crushing, life-draining status quo.

Because this is collective care, embodied solidarity, radical accountability, fractal responsibility…imperfect and insufficient under the stranglehold of capitalism, but revolutionary and necessary nonetheless.

In most cases, we absolutely can if that’s your preference! The only exception to this is for bursary clients, where — because there is intentionally no application or paperwork — a longer consultation session is required to ensure eligibility (but again, every potential client can end our consultation at any time if they’ve decided that we’re not a good fit).

If we decide to work together after this shorter meeting, your first appointment will be your 90-minute intake session — and some of our time will be dedicated to issues and to-dos we would have covered during a longer consultation session. The questions I ask you will also be more broadly focused, as I’ll have learned less about you during consultation. At the same time, our first extended meeting will be an actual therapy session, allowing us to go wherever the present moment takes us — and for some folx, knowing this can create more comfort and momentum. Please see the Therapy Process page for full details about consultation and intake sessions to determine what makes best sense for you!

My hope is that completing my detailed Session Rate Self-Assessment Tool will provide you with a solid sense of where we’d set your fee (see the Fee Structure & Process page for more detail). Though we might clarify a few points in conversation to zero in on the most fitting rate, you know your life and financial situation best. If you’ve determined that your circumstances most closely align with the Restorative Rate column, you’re eligible for a sliding scale rate (if a slot is currently available, as detailed on the same fees page)! And if you’re feeling drawn to a particular Restorative Rate based on the prompts you’ve highlighted within that column and their implied tier-aligned nuances, that’s likely the rate we’d set together in conversation (if that slot is currently available, as detailed on the same fees page).

I also recognise that the assessment (necessarily) leaves grey area and not being 100% sure about fees beforehand might cause too much uncertainty for you to feel comfortable moving forward with a consultation. If you’d like to discuss your rate before we (potentially) meet for our consult, just let me know — we can arrange to have a quick call. I do want to acknowledge that it can be really tricky to start with a conversation about fees, as we lose the opportunity to first connect in more meaningful ways. But (and I hope you’re sensing the theme here!) I want to be as flexible as possible — your needs are far more important than my concerns about process.

Our intake session will be 90 minutes (at the extended session rate). Please see the Therapy Process page for full details!

Confidentiality is absolutely integral to the therapeutic relationship — you need to feel comfortable sharing intimate details about your life, knowing that I’ll protect this information in every way I can and must. As a Registered Social Worker with the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers, I have an ethical obligation to honour your rights to confidentiality, privacy of health information, informed consent, and self-determination. As part of our consultation and intake sessions, we’ll go over responsibilities, limitations, and exceptions related to these interconnected rights as set out within the scope of my role as an RSW psychotherapist, and I’ll address any questions or concerns you have in full before you consent to engage in therapy. Over the course of our work together, we’ll revisit issues related to these rights whenever necessary.

Because healing demands and deserves time — for you (as client), for me (as practitioner), for us (in relationship).

From my own experience as a client, I know how tricky the transition into therapeutic space can be: you rush to arrive (virtually or physically) and the clock starts ticking before you can catch your breath. You push to quickly find your centre and focus for the session, then it feels like your time is over just as you’re beginning the most important work.

On the other hand, as a practitioner, I’ve experienced what a difference that extra 10 minutes can make for our therapeutic relationship and process — it gives us a bit of dedicated breathing room to settle in and genuinely reconnect before diving deeper into the work, allowing us to do more with all of our time. I’ve also learned (and finally accepted) that it takes me far longer than the standard 10 minutes allotted between sessions to process our time together, write session notes that can meaningfully support our work, and centre myself in specific ways for my next client. I can’t (routinely) book appointments back-to-back, I don’t (and won’t) work in a setting regulated by scarcity and austerity, so we don’t need to carve precious time out of our weekly session!

These 10 minutes are a gift to do with what we will, intentionally and responsively: we might use them to pour a cup of tea as we catch up on something special that happened in the week since we last saw each other (your joys are just as important to our work as your struggles!); to vent and release tension about the mundane and meaningful difficulties of everyday life — the traffic you ran into on the way over, the tantrum your child threw just as your were about to come online; or to slow down, pause, and move through an orienting and grounding practice together, allowing you to more fully arrive into our therapeutic space.

Sadly, psychotherapy in Ontario isn’t covered by OHIP unless it’s provided by a medical professional — including psychiatrists, family doctors, and nurse practitioners — or a mental health professional who specifically works as part of a Family Health Team, making it highly and unacceptably inaccessible (and heavily mainstreamed and medicalised).

Extended health benefits, through your employer or educational institution, may provide some coverage for psychotherapy and/or social work services. Check your policy to ensure that it reimburses for services provided by a Registered Social Worker (RSW), and to determine the amount of coverage. Unfortunately, the dollar amount will likely be quite limited, but could at least secure a bit of an overall discount to your session fees! I don’t bill directly at this time, but I’ll provide you with a weekly receipt for services to submit to your insurance company.

Yes! The Canada Revenue Agency allows therapy with a Registered Social Worker (RSW) to be claimed in full as a medical expense. If you have extended health benefits partially covering your psychotherapy expenses for the year, you can claim the remainder of your fees on your taxes. Do note that you won’t be reimbursed for medical expenses in full. They are applied as a credit, which — depending on your income — may reduce the overall amount you’re required to pay in taxes. I’ll provide you with a detailed annual receipt for services, which you should keep on file to support your claim.

Wherever possible, I ask that you provide at least 24 hours, and ideally 48 hours, notice if you’re unable to make your session. This allows me to offer other clients your slot or adequately plan for other work (or regenerative rest or play!). I will, of course, provide you with the same notice if I need to cancel our appointment.

I know that 24-48 hours notice isn’t always feasible, though — you might awake to a flare-up, your child or parent may fall ill the day of our appointment, you may be offered a last minute shift at work that you have to take for financial reasons, etc. Our relationship needs to be a source of abundant and flexible care, trust, and understanding in your life — not another rigid, draining, punitive demand. If an unforeseen circumstance arises the day of our appointment, making it impossible for you to attend, just let me know and we’ll try to reschedule your session for a more suitable time that week. In unusual cases where I don’t/can’t hear from you (e.g., due to an emergency), I’ll wait 15 minutes before acknowledging the appointment as missed and moving in to other work. I’ll also reach out via your preferred method of contact to ensure that you’re safe.

If cancellations are happening routinely without rescheduling, even with the requested 24-48 hour notice, it can mean that our relationship isn’t meeting your needs in some way. If I sense this may be the case, I’ll check in with you so we can address it.

At this time, I don’t charge anything for appointments that are cancelled/missed without the requested minimum 24 hours notice and not rescheduled, but — with full transparency — this may change in the future, if my approach is creating collective equity issues. I’ll provide two months notice to clients if I intend to make any changes to my cancellation policy!

To honour the clear and care-full boundaries that nurture and sustain this particular form and depth of healing, I don’t provide crisis support or therapy between sessions — by phone, text, or email. This is another means of protecting the sacredness of our relational process: we are in real, deep, regenerative communion, and our healing connection is enabled — in part — through its difference from friendship; our work takes place within the container of the therapeutic space, and you (and I) recursively expand this change and growth beyond it.

More generally speaking, I don’t use text messaging with clients (due to the medium’s communication norms, cultural context, and easily breached confidentiality), but of course we can communicate by phone or email! You might give me a call to rebook a cancellation, I could promise to send you a few resources by email between sessions, or we may even plan a 15-minute check-in about a life-changing step you’re taking midweek. If our conversation moves into deeper therapeutic territory, I’ll just gently reorient us — we’ll make sure to pick this emergent thread back up the next time we meet.

My genuine apologies in advance: this is going to be looong. But it’s so important that you have all the knowledge necessary to make a fully informed decision about your practitioner. There’s a lot of (mis)information to wade through out there. I’ve summarised the most salient points here — with links to additional detail and supporting sources — to help facilitate your process!

Okay, here we go…

‘Psychotherapy’ is what’s known as a ‘controlled act’, and ‘psychotherapist’ is a ‘protected title’, in Ontario — meaning that only specific, regulated practitioners are legally allowed to call themselves psychotherapists and/or practice psychotherapy. These include members of The Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers (the OCSWSSW, of which I’m a member), The College of Nurses of Ontario, The College of Occupational Therapists of Ontario, The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, The College of Psychologists of Ontario, and The College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario.

Regulation is a means of reducing risk of harm to clients through education and training requirements, standards of practice, ethical obligations, and a formal complaints process for breaches of these standards and obligations. All currently regulated healing professions were once unregulated, and began with culturally embedded, community-based service, care, and expertise — built through the art, science, and politics of survival. Many practices and modalities — particularly holistic interventions that engage body, mind, spirit, and system — are rooted in the attuned brilliance and exhaustive, loving labour of BIPOC communities across time, place, and intersections (notably within and between disability, queer, trans, womxn, femme, poor, working-class, spiritual, and faith-based communities) and have been extractively, aculturally, and/or acitationally co-opted for ownership, gatekeeping, power, and profit by western disciplines, white scholars and practitioners, and the colonial state. Many folx who devote their existence to radical care and healing — who are experts, scholars, practitioners, leaders, educators, organisers, consultants, and specialists — can’t or don’t seek the institutional ‘education’ to ‘practice’ what they’re already living. Some of us bide our time, whittled away to the nub by glorious, arduous labour that’s sickeningly underpaid and even more that doesn’t count as ‘work’, perhaps finally securing the resources to credentialise our gifts and callings — only to have more of our commitment and skills stolen and undervalued through unpaid internships and low-wage positions that claim to ‘teach’ us without recognising what we’ve been embodying all our lives and across generations…we have much to learn and contribute, but fear and/or accept that little-to-none of it will be realised through these means. All of us collaborating in this transformative, relational changework know that to persist ethically and sustainably, we’ll have to be relentlessly, creatively resistant against burnout, scarcity, austerity, assimilation, erasure, division, cynicism, and denigration. Too many more of us to fathom would be wounded, ailing, abandoned, alienated, or dead without this strategising, exploitation, genius, sacrifice, and sustenance. There are highly skilled and ethical practitioners working as part of currently unregulated care and healing professions — for example, peer workers, somatic coaches, meditation teachers, craniosacral therapists, and birth and end-of-life doulas — and practitioners who meet the standards for membership within a particular college but fail to provide skilled, ethical care. In other words, regulation shouldn’t — in and of itself — be seen as a guarantee of a given practitioner’s capacities to meet your specific needs and expectations, and there may be practitioners who are part of unregulated professions and the broader community who could better meet them.

Click here to read a Canadian Association of Social Workers (CASW) article that summarises the basic differences between how social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and GPs practice with regards to assessment and treatment in the context of mental health. Click here for an Ontario Association of Social Workers (OASW) FAQ that provides more rich and specific detail about how social workers practice in this context. The relationally supported, talk-based aspect of this change, growth, and wellness work may be referred to as either psychotherapy, therapy, or counselling — depending on practitioner, jurisdiction, discipline, and practice environment — but ‘counselling’ is not a regulated act in Ontario. Click here for a comprehensive (and accurate!) blog post written by a colleague at The Healing Collective, which digs a bit deeper into how members of each of the above Ontario colleges practice psychotherapy. A key takeaway from the linked post is the overlap and distinction between Registered Social Workers (RSWs) and Registered Psychotherapists (RPs) in this province, which include clear differences in educational backgrounds and nuanced variability in core disciplinary values, conceptualisations, and foci. At the individual level, there may be little difference between how an RSW psychotherapist and an RP actually practice — this is where research, consultation, and fit really come in to play.

In Ontario, social workers comprise the majority of practitioners offering mental health services and psychotherapy. Click here to read how the OCSWSSW outlines the scope of practice for RSWs (which includes me). Click here for the OCSWSSW’s specific guidelines for the practice of psychotherapy by RSWs. Realistically, our work will encompass interventions that fall within the scope of the regulated act of psychotherapy, the also-regulated practice of social work, the unregulated acts of counselling and somatic guiding/coaching, and what the OCSWSSW defines as ‘psychotherapy services’ and ‘counselling services’ (you can read more about the murky distinctions between these services and the act of psychotherapy on page 5 of the linked guidelines). It will also, most importantly, include the deeply healing, living praxis of genuine, inquisitive, empathic, nurturing, embodied, and just human interconnecting — which cannot be regulated, possessed, or professionalised, but must be care-fully boundaried, continuously consensual, and radically ethical in the context of a therapeutic relationship.

As noted, members of each of the above Ontario colleges adhere to a specific Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice — click here for the OCSWSSW’s, to which I adhere as a foundational baseline. Click here for detailed information regarding filing a complaint or report about an RSW’s professional conduct.

Very (very!) broadly speaking, social workers providing mental health services and practicing psychotherapy engage a range of interventions that overlap with those employed by other practitioners, but necessarily underpinned with an ethical commitment to social justice — understanding and addressing the ways in which their clients’ experiences are dynamically embedded in systemic context. While social workers provide comprehensive, holistic assessment and intervention across biological, psychological, emotional, social, political, cultural, temporal, environmental, and spiritual domains, we cannot diagnose mental ‘disorder’ or ‘illness’ (as defined by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), nor can we prescribe medication of any kind — though we can and should connect you with practitioners who provide these services, when appropriate. Social workers who practice psychotherapy should have additional, specialised training beyond their Bachelor and/or Master of Social Work; are required to engage in ongoing learning and development; and should be supervised in their work, via mentor practitioners and peer colleagues, in independent, group, and organisational practice settings.

Given our systems-based, client-centred lens, most social worker psychotherapists (including me!) draw from a range of therapeutic modalities and associated interventions/techniques (e.g., Emotion/Emotionally Focused Therapy [separate modalities both known as EFT], Narrative Therapy, Relational Psychotherapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy [ACT], Cognitive Behavioural Therapy [CBT], Dialectical Behaviour Therapy [DBT], psychodynamic therapies, Gestalt Therapy, Internal Family Systems [IFS], Structural Family Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, somatic [i.e., body-mind] therapies, feminist therapies) to practice what’s known as ‘integratively’ — responsively adapting to each client’s specific, multifaceted experiences, sense(s) of self, and therapeutic needs.

Whether in work with individuals, couples, constellations/polycules, families, groups, communities, organisations, or institutions, many social workers (including me!) explicitly commit to anti-oppressive; anti-racist; anti-colonial; anti-ableist; non-pathologising; sex, sex work, kink, and body positive; harm reduction-based; 2SLGBTQIA+-inclusive; culturally humble; trauma-informed; strength-affirming practice…but this does not necessarily mean that they will hold themselves accountable to these complex, intersecting, demanding praxes, and even when they do, they — meaning we, meaning all of us — will inevitably stumble. Ask a lot of questions when you’re seeking services; challenge practitioners when it feels important and safe to do so; trust your psychopoliticospiritual gut; and always feel free to discontinue service with any practitioner (social worker or not) who fails to accept feedback with open-hearted humility, engage in critical dialogue and reflection, and (re)enact their espoused ethics.

…we made it :)!

Radical healing is systemic, interdependent, responsive, and emergent. While the focus of this particular aspect of my practice is therapy — rather than casework — as a social worker, this process necessarily encompasses connecting clients with resources and referrals that can support their holistic access, belonging, dignity, and well-being (if this is something they want!). Together, we’ll uncover and explore what this means for you, specifically. It could be linking you with a parenting, caregiver, QTBIPOC community-building, social action, mindfulness, survivor, or bereavement support group; help with securing gender expansive and affirming, housing, accessibility, respite, reproductive justice, or harm reduction services; or providing a referral to specialised intervention, such as EMDR, osteopathy, qigong, or comprehensive case support itself. While I don’t accompany clients to appointments or engage in full-on case coordination as part of my work in this practice, I’d be delighted to collaborate with other practitioner members of your support system — with your written consent, of course!

As an RSW in independent practice, it’s not possible for me to ethically support clients who are experiencing extreme crisis, including:

• Chronic and consistently life-threatening substance use

• Chronic and life-threatening issues with food

• Consistently imminent risk of suicide. (Note that this is not the same as recurrent suicidal ideation, intermittent risk, or past attempt[s] — we can absolutely work through your suicidal thoughts and feelings together, and will do so lovingly, sturdily, and as crucially non-coercively as possible)

• Current and consistent risk of abuse or harm to others. (I approach all issues of family and community violence through a transformative justice lens and my membership in the OCSWSSW, which is necessary to practice as I do in Ontario, creates complex ethical limitations around this work, which we’ll discuss at the very beginning of our consultation)

• Other issues requiring intensive and/or on-call responsiveness.

I also do not have specialised training in supporting clients who are experiencing intense symptoms of ‘OCD’, ‘phobias’, ‘schizophrenia’, ‘dissociative identity disorder’, or ‘personality disorders’ as defined by the DSM, though I have worked meaningfully with folx who are struggling with repetitive and intrusive actions and thoughts; fear, hyper-vigilance, alienation, and distrust; feelings of dissociation, derealisation, detachment, fragmentation, and disembodiment; and clients who have been diagnosed with personality disorders but approach the labelling and pathologising of their experience with critical resistance and/or mad pride.

If you are in extreme crisis and in need of immediate support, please see the Resources page — I so hope that this helps to connect you with the care you so deserve.

My issues of interest and commitment, areas of specialisation, and clients/communities of focus are broadly explored on the Offerings page. If you’re interested in working together and want to know whether I can support specific therapeutic needs and intentions not explicitly listed there, please don’t hesitate to contact me! I have an ethical obligation to understand and share limitations to my current (but always evolving) scope of practice.

If we meet for a consultation and I do not feel that I can adequately support you based on what you share with me, I will do my best to refer you to a more suitable practitioner, practice approach, or community-based resource — if you request this. In some cases, I may be able to work with you as part of a circle of care that includes more focused support for specific issues that fall outside my scope of practice.

I am not the therapist for everyone. No one is. But I can full-heartedly promise you that our work will be guided by your therapeutic needs and intentions. I will never contort your lived expertise into a mission — this would be in complete opposition to the ethics of radical care. While I do understand the personal as reciprocally interrelated with the political — and all healing as holistic, interdependent, and systemic — the ways in which we’d explicitly address such issues would depend entirely on what you brought to therapy. This is your time and your space.

It’s my responsibility to meet you as and where you are, working to understand all the ways you’ve come to be. And, because we are moving together through the embodied, empathic work of transformative relationship, inquiry, emergence, reintegration, and re-becoming, there may be moments when I respond to a felt sense that exploring some specific sociopolitical — or, to language it another way, relational-cultural — context for y/our experience could be deeply meaningful and beneficial. Like anything I offer during the course of therapy, this will be informed by your healing process, our therapeutic relationship, and the modalities and practices we’re responsively engaging — not my (personal, political, or professional) agenda. If, at any point, I contextualise your experience in a way that misattunes to your needs and values without addressing this, please tell me — in as much or as little detail as you feel is necessary. I will do everything I can to preemptively earn this education. If you gift me it, I’ll hear you, acknowledge what you’ve risked sharing, engage with you in deeply reflexive dialogue without spiralling into shame, seek feedback and development outside of our time together, and transparently check back in with you as necessary. In other words, I’ll care, learn, grow, and change.

Please also know that I won’t judge the way you speak about or engage with social justice issues. And by this I mean that I know that we are all in a continuous process of (re)learning; anticipate that we will hold diverging values and views; and accept complete accountability for working through my own — through critical, contemplative, and collective engagement — to protect the sacredness of our therapeutic work and bond. This protection includes understanding the rare cases in which I sense that value differences may be disrupting our ability to therapeutically connect: you can trust me to bring this to our attention for transparent discussion and necessary action, so — as much as you can — try to let go of worrying about this (if you are).

The world is remade through messy, ugly, nuanced, painful, loving, courageous dialogue across difference. A radical, relational approach to healing protects space for just this type of daring, complex conversation — but the ethical practice of therapy only rarely demands it.

Somatic healing, from the Greek word ‘soma’, engages our living bodies in their existing, unfolding, dimensional wholeness — as known from within.

At the most fundamental level, any and all therapeutic somatic practices — both more contained, structured encounters and emergent, intuitive explorations — need to be supported by a secure holding environment, trustworthy relationship, holistic resourcing, an internal sense of safeness and readiness, and continuous consent.

You never, ever have to participate in any somatic work you don’t want to. Full stop. Folx have exquisitely sensible, adaptive reasons for compartmentalisation, disembodiment, and dissociation. Full stop. Pressuring people into experiences and practices that are modality- or outcome-, rather than client- and person-, centred is unethical and violational. Full stop. Bodymindfulness and movement into contact involve risk and can feel frightening, overwhelming, and threatening; attuned breathing, dropped-in sensing, and vulnerable emoting may not (ever) have been — may still not be — accessible, possible, or safe. Asking clients into experience can feel less like an invitation and more like a directive when the request is coming from a ‘trained professional’ entrusted with facilitating the therapeutic process. Folx can feel obligated to ‘push through’, ‘try harder’, ‘show commitment to the work’, reinforce the practitioner’s efforts and ‘expertise’, and ‘be good clients’…and can be rewounded, refragmented, and — at the very worst — retraumatised, through what was supposed to be a healing praxis of relating, resourcing, co-regulating, and reintegrating. I’ve experienced this as a client and training participant, and witnessed it too many times in clinical/community settings. It’s incredibly oppressive and misguided: clients — not practitioners — are the experts of their own lives, therapeutic intentions, moment-to-moment desires and capacities, and full-bodied awareness. You cannot force healing. Full stop.

Together, we’ll listen — closely, respectfully, and care-fully — to what your bodymind knows, speaks, and needs…learning and leading from this wisdom. If something doesn’t feel right or safe or engaging, we’ll get curious and acceptant: our present, emotionally inquisitive exploration will make and hold the very type of space that allows for (re)new(ed) possibilities, paths, connections, and truths to emerge. Yes, as we build our trusting and collaborative bond, as we (re)enable your internal and external resources, as you stabilise and recentre, we’ll work to incrementally expand and deepen what you feel safe enough — held and heard enough — to experience, process, and integrate. Healing happens at these very edges as these very encounters — but only with unwavering deference to your embodied self-knowledge, agency, discernment, and boundaries.

Fuck…I know. I’m painfully, intimately conscious of the reality that privatised therapy is financially inaccessible, and I’ve thought incredibly intentionally about how to mitigate the cost of my offerings, while still being able to sustain my (radical) life and work. These issues are inextricably intertwined: I can’t practice as ethically, flexibly, care-fully, and creatively as (I feel is) necessary within the constraints of funded agencies that provide subsidised services, but I have to earn enough (for my practice) to survive and thrive within the unbearable constraints of capitalism and neoliberalism. I hope you’ll feel my accountability to this political and ethical dilemma as you learn about my therapeutic approach: I’ve tried to infuse it into every step and structure of my practice.

Necessarily interwoven with attuned and integral efforts to nurture and protect our healing relationship, it’s why I offer a free, hour-long consultation session; why my standard sessions are 60 minutes instead of 50; why my standard fees are set at the lowest end of the fee range for private psychotherapy with a fully licensed practitioner in Toronto; why I offer a discounted rate for 90-minute sessions; why I offer my 30-minute three- and six-month check-ins at no cost; why there are no differences in my fees for alternative locations and offerings; why I offer as many sliding scale spaces as I can and set these as a percentage of my standard fee client roster; why there are no session-number limits for my sliding scale slots; why I offer zero-fee bursaries supported through an equity-based fee structure; why my fee structure and process are completely transparent…and why I know that all of this is nowhere near enough. We deserve radical healing, regenerative communion, living-and-breathing dignity, (un)yielding accountability, and revolutionary care: this is part of my offering to our collective, expansive, transformative work.

Please visit the Fees & Bursaries area for full details about my fee structure and healing bursaries — including current availability, session rates, my Session Rate Self-Assessment Tool, and the process for requesting a Restorative Rate or bursary.

Please also see the Resources page for a list of additional low- or no-cost therapy options across the GTA and Ontario.

Yes…and deep, meaningful healing takes time. This is not to say that you can’t or won’t benefit from therapy in the short term — you absolutely should feel cumulatively supported; seen; heard; held; better able to cope; and more centred, grounded, and purposeful from early on in our therapeutic process. And then — when we’ve created the trust, security, and stability necessary for transformative, holistic, sustainable change — our work will begin in earnest.

We ask these questions because we are in pain, struggling, and exhausted. We yearn for immediate relief and complete resolution, and are sold the empty promise of quick fixes and easy solutions. The interdiscipline of psychotherapy (broadly defined and encompassing psychiatry, psychology, and social work) has done a lot to popularise the ‘evidence-based’ generalisation that meaningful and sustainable change can necessarily take place over 6 or 8 or 12 or 20 sessions. It’s harmful, unethical, and too often untrue — dictated by constraints that are interrelated with the lived complexity of human struggle but distant from the immediate reality of therapeutic experience, including: the philosophical and political intricacies of scientific praxis (of what gets to count as knowledge and how we make it); the demands of insurance companies and funders; wildly differing conceptualisations of wellness, dignity, and justice; concerns about professional and disciplinary legitimacy and status; and the prioritisation of profit over people.

Crisis can be coped with in short term therapy. Symptoms can be reduced in short term therapy. Distress can be eased in short term therapy. Acute trauma can be processed in short term therapy. Grief can be tended to in short term therapy. Psychoeducation can occur in short term therapy. Patterns and paths forward can be revealed in short term therapy. Decisions can be reached in short term therapy. Insight can be (re)illuminated in short term therapy. Embodied awareness can re-emerge in short term therapy. Resources — internal, relational, and systemic — can be (re)engaged in short term therapy. Hope, stability, and interconnection can be rediscovered in short term therapy.

Radical healing takes time.

How long? I don’t know…it depends. It’s a risky, frustrating, respectful interim truth that increasingly too few modalities, service organisations, and practitioners are willing to really, openly acknowledge. For clients with a specific goal of targeted symptom reduction, increased self- and relational awareness, focused grief work, or support through a life transition, it could be three to six months. For clients with complex struggles and situations; long term distress, burnout, and/or multiple diagnoses; entrenched relational dynamics, protective responses, and survival strategies; attachment wounds; childhood, intergenerational, and other forms of relational-cultural trauma; and those seeking psychospirituoemotional transformation — those issues best addressed through relational-experiential therapy — it can be years. Your answer will be rooted in the exquisite specificity of your circumstances and intentions…and shaped by the unavoidable realities of energy, attention, commitment, money, and other resources in high demand.

We’ll explore what’s essential and expansively possible for you as part of your consultation and across the duration of our healing relationship. We’ll ensure our process remains continuously attuned to your evolving needs through constant feedback and dedicated check-ins at the three- and six-month marks (learn more on the Therapy Process page). And for however long you choose, we will do real, good, hard, beautiful work…the sort that begins with this depth of transparency, accountability, understanding, and care…and necessarily continues to unfold beyond it.