Trans Liberatory Therapy

Therapy for Trans and Non-Binary People in Victoria, B.C.

As a trans and non-binary therapist, working with my own community is important to me. I understand the strain of having to contextualize my trans experience for the space-holders and caregivers in my life. Re-living this in the therapeutic context can feel counter to my goals in therapy. Yet, going to a trans therapist doesn’t mean that we de-facto have a therapist who understand our every experience. The trans community is incredibly diverse, and we each filter our experiences through our individual lives and lenses. However, it can mean we are starting from a foundation of greater understanding.

My approach to working with trans people is informed by gender-affirmative therapy, which means that your feelings, thoughts, and choices about your gender and your journey forward are honoured. Beyond this, my practice draws from Critical Liberation Psychotherapy, which informs my critical lens about historical harms that have existed for trans people in the field of psychotherapy, and which proposes new ways forward for our healing. So, I approach healing for trans people as a collective endeavour: we suffer together, we survive together, and we heal together. Moving toward collective healing allows us to ask: what does healing as a member of a community look like? What new possibilities can we envision for ourselves?

When Gender Is The Exploration

I know that trans people are not a ‘niche’, and that we come to therapy wanting support with a diversity of hopes, dreams, traumas, and challenges. Wherever you are in life, know that you’ll be met here precisely where you are. And, when you are coming to therapy hoping to explore your gender identity, considering transition, or processing your experiences of gender, my approach encompasses the following:

• Somatic Therapy: for those who are gendered, to feel into the ‘felt sense’ inside so that we get to know the various places and parts of us that hold the important, embodied information about our experiences of gender

• Power Analysis: drawing from feminist psychotherapy to identify and unpack the social scripts which dictate our limiting beliefs about gender and the ways in which the hierarchical gender binary have informed our shame and caused us to internalize transphobia

• Critical Liberation Psychotherapy: exploring new ways to experience belonging and heal from internalized transphobia, so that we don’t continue to struggle in isolation

• AEDP Therapy: to help us move together toward your personal experiences of gender-based suffering as well as gender euphoria, and find ways to transform suffering into flourishing