MY APPROACH
How I work: The therapeutic approaches behind Grounded Practice
Three approaches shape the way I work, not as rigid frameworks applied to everyone, but as lenses I draw on based on what each person brings. They complement each other, and in practice the lines between them are fluid. What follows is a fuller explanation of each: what it is, how I use it, and what it tends to offer.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative Therapy is grounded in a deceptively simple idea: we are not our problems. The struggles we carry — anxiety, addiction, shame, a persistent sense of inadequacy — are not the truth of who we are. They are stories. Stories shaped by experience, by culture, by the people who raised us and the systems we grew up inside. And stories, unlike diagnoses, can be examined, questioned, and rewritten.
In practice, this means we look at the story alongside you rather than at you. We ask questions like: when did this story begin? Whose voice is loudest in it? What does it leave out? What would be true about you if this story weren’t the whole story? This is collaborative, respectful work — it doesn’t require you to become a different person, but it does require a willingness to look at the stories you’ve been handed and decide which ones you actually want to keep.
Narrative Therapy is at the centre of how I approach almost everything — anxiety, trauma, identity, relationships, addiction — because the way we story our experience is where so much of what causes suffering, and what creates change, actually lives.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness in therapy isn’t about achieving a calm, empty mind — or about becoming someone who meditates every morning. It’s about developing the capacity to be present with what’s actually happening, without being swept away by it. That distinction — being with something rather than being consumed by it — is where the therapeutic value lives.
For anxiety, this means being able to notice a worried thought without immediately treating it as fact. For trauma, it means developing the capacity to stay present with difficult material rather than dissociating from it or being overwhelmed by it. For ADHD, it means building a different kind of relationship with attention — not forcing stillness, but cultivating awareness. For all of these, the mindfulness I draw on is embodied and dynamic rather than passive — it pays attention to sensation, impulse, and emotion as much as thought.
I introduce mindfulness practices within sessions based on what seems useful for each person, rather than as a standard protocol. For some people it becomes a central part of the work; for others it plays a quieter, supporting role. I adapt the approach for people who find conventional mindfulness inaccessible — including those with ADHD, trauma histories, or sensory sensitivities.
Depth Work
Depth Work attends to what lives beneath the surface and the patterns, wounds, and longings that shape how we move through the world, often without our awareness. This isn’t about excavating the past for its own sake, or about reaching some definitive origin story that explains everything. It’s about understanding how history is still alive in the present and what that understanding opens up.
This kind of work tends to be slower, less structured, and more exploratory than other approaches. It requires a therapeutic relationship with enough trust and safety to look at things that have been defended against, sometimes for a very long time. It is particularly relevant for people doing longer-term work, for those navigating identity questions, and for anyone who has found that more solution-focused approaches have addressed the surface of a problem without touching what drives it.
Depth Work draws on psychodynamic and depth psychology traditions, and it works most fluidly alongside Narrative Therapy, using the narrative lens to understand not just what the deeper patterns are, but how they have been storied, sustained, and what becomes possible when those stories are examined.
How these approaches work together
Client-led
No approach is imposed. The work follows what you bring. Some people need the narrative lens most; others need to slow down into the body; others need the depth. Usually all three are present in different proportions at different moments.
Integrated
The three approaches speak to different dimensions of the same experience — meaning, presence, and depth. They reinforce each other rather than competing, and in practice the movement between them is often seamless.
Evolving
The balance shifts as the work develops. Early sessions often look different from later ones, not because the approach changed, but because you did. The therapy adjusts to meet where you actually are rather than where you were when you started.
READY TO BEGIN?
The approach follows you. Let’s find what works.
Request a free 15-minute consultation to learn more about working together. Whether you’re ready to start therapy in Vancouver or have questions about how we can work together online across Canada, I look forward to hearing what brings you to counselling