Lisa began her career working for several non-profit organizations, working with many varied populations, specifically Aboriginal communities. She provided therapy services at an Aboriginal health centre, offering culturally relevant care to heal trauma and other mental health issues. She started her own private practice 11 years ago.

Lisa uses emotion and solution-focused techniques to help you meet your goals. This means talking about feelings and exploring them in order to help you experience, identify and regulate emotions, to better guide you in your relationships and decision-making. Advice and expertise on healthy relationships, boundaries, assertiveness and other issues you may be struggling with can be provided as well. Lisa can help you figure out what your personal triggers are and how they impact your life, so you can move forward in a good way and feel at peace. Exploring your concerns together in a safe, open dialogue in which you feel cared for is part of this process. You will practice self-regulating and transition to a more secure bond with yourself and in close relationships. This includes emotional exploration, visualizations, Art Therapy, Gestalt, Sandtray and other creative/therapeutic techniques in sessions when deemed appropriate. Occasionally thought records and other exercises from the Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy approach can be integrated.

Emotion-focused techniques are used in therapy sessions as it is an evidence-based, effective treatment for feelings of depression and anxiety as well as with couples and relationships. These techniques help clients who struggle with affective and personality disorders as well as trauma. Emotion-focused sessions include discussing feelings in a complete way or emotion-coaching, helping you transform and make meaning in new ways. We live in a society that better teaches us to think and behave in certain ways, but our ability to feel deeply, use those feelings to guide and heal our lives, is not as readily taught. So as we navigate our lives, we sometimes feel we lack the skills to sit with intense feelings and this can result in numbing, drinking, overeating our feelings to stuff them down. Over time this tends to create a life that we experience as empty and hollow, devoid of joy and possibly even experience feelings we call anxiety and depression. Lisa’s sessions will take you through the process of sitting with feelings, letting them inform you so you can be at peace and use them in life and relationships to guide you to fulfillment. This can include bodywork, visualizations, open-ended questions and the observation of patterns and tendencies.

Solution-focused techniques enable us to discuss healthy communication, family dynamics and related skills in a unique way, tailored to you and the people you interact with. An example could be learning to be assertive of your needs in your relationship with your partner. We will talk about basic skills, how to apply them and try different ways until you feel your goals are met. There are many techniques that can be used to support the management of intense feelings. Lisa feels it is best to offer many of these and most people find there are a few tools that work best for them and become their “go-tos”. Examples include exercise, mindfulness, gratitude journals…but a favourite that is often the most effective is Meditation. When stressed, the Sympathetic Nervous System becomes activated, releasing stress hormones/chemicals resulting in increased feelings of anxiety. Through deep breathing we can activate the Parasympathetic Nervous System which begins to breakdown stress chemicals and increase relaxation. Through regular meditation the threshold for anxiety/stress can actually be changed, so it takes more stressful events to result in feelings of anxiety. But for this to happen, meditation must be a regular, daily exercise.

The theoretical basis which is used to assess and conceptualize your work with Lisa is Attachment Theory. This means your primary attachments with your parent(s)/caregivers and siblings in your childhood taught you how to relate and be in a relationship. This is great if you have a healthy family, but can be problematic if you feel your experience in past relationships has been unhealthy or not ideal in some way. The result can be relationship patterns in your life that you feel are not as satisfying as you would like &/or you do not have the intimacy/closeness you need. This attachment history can be healed, and you can learn how to relate in a new and different way in your adult life that works better for you, your partner(s), friends and family.