How I Came to This Work

My path to becoming a counsellor didn't begin in a classroom. As a teenager, I spent significant time within the mental health system, where I experienced what it was like to have diagnoses, labels, and other people's expectations shape the way I understood myself and my future.

As I grew older, I came to understand my experiences — and myself — very differently. My life has also included significant experiences of grief and loss, deepening my understanding of how profoundly difficult experiences can shape us.

A diagnosis, a difficult chapter, a significant loss, or someone else's understanding of you does not have to become the whole story of who you are.

My professional path has since included years of mental health advocacy and community-based work supporting people navigating crisis, homelessness, trauma, and significant life challenges. Since 2014, I have also been involved in leading Christmas Bags of Hope and Operation Christmas Hope, community initiatives that began by supporting people experiencing homelessness and have since expanded to support refugee children and youth, as well as young people transitioning out of foster care.

These experiences have deepened my understanding of how trauma, instability, loss, and major life transitions can affect people in ways that aren't always visible from the outside.

Today, I bring those experiences together with my professional training in a counselling approach that is warm, practical, collaborative, and trauma-informed. My role isn't to tell you who you should become. It's to help you understand what's happening, recognize patterns that may be keeping you stuck, reconnect with your own voice, and decide what moving forward looks like for you.