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How I work
Client-CenteredTherapyin Edmonton
My approach to therapy is client-centered and collaborative.
Client-centered therapy starts from a position that sounds simple and changes everything about how a session runs: you're the one who knows what your life is actually like. My job isn't to diagnose you from the outside and hand back a plan. It's to help you hear what you already know underneath the noise, and then to be useful about it.
What that means in practice
It means I don't come in with an agenda for who you should become. It means we go where you need to go on a given week, even if that's not where we left off. And it means if something I say doesn't fit, “that's not it” is a complete and useful sentence in this room. I'd genuinely rather be corrected than agreed with.
The short version
You are the expert in your own life,you are always in the driver's seat,and I might just pop in as GPSfrom time to time.
That's the whole idea. GPS doesn't decide where you're going. It tells you what it can see from up there, offers a route, and recalculates without judgment when you take a different one.
What a client-centered session feels like
Slower than you might expect, at first. There's no intake checklist we march through. I'll ask what brought you in, and then I'll mostly follow you.
You'll notice I reflect a lot: saying back what I heard, sometimes in slightly different words, to check whether I've actually got it. That's not a technique for its own sake. Most people arrive having been half-heard for a long time, and being accurately heard is more destabilising and more useful than it sounds.
You don't need to be fixed. You need to be heard.
That's not a slogan about going easy on you. Being heard properly is what makes the harder parts possible.
Client-centered doesn't mean I have no opinions
Client-centered is sometimes read as a therapist who agrees with everything. That is not how I run it.
Compassionate without coddling. Direct without being harsh.
If I notice a pattern, I'll name it. If you tell me you're fine and your shoulders say otherwise, I'll say so. If you're about to talk yourself out of something you clearly want, I'll ask about it. Warmth and honesty aren't in tension. Validation on its own is comfortable, and comfortable is not the same as useful.
What client-centered protects is the direction. You choose that. I'm honest inside it.
Who this suits
Client-centered work tends to fit well if you've been talked over, managed, or handled, at work or at home. It fits if you're tired of being told what your problem is. It fits if you need to build back trust in your own read on things, which is very often the case for people who've spent years deferring to everyone else's.
It's also where almost everyone starts with me, regardless of what we do later.
Where this fits with everything else
Client-centered isn't one option on a menu here. It's the ground the rest sits on. If we later use EMDR for something that won't move by talking about it, or CBT to get at a thought pattern that keeps running, we do that inside a relationship where you're still steering.
It's also the foundation of the Speak Up Skills program, because you can't practise having a voice with someone who keeps taking the wheel.
When you're ready