Trauma Therapy
When something overwhelming happens, your body does what it needs to do to get you through it, and then doesn't always switch off afterwards. We work with that directly, at whatever pace you can manage.
Learn more →Counselling online · Canada & internationally
Whatever you're going through, you can talk it through with someone whose whole job is to listen properly and help you make sense of it. Sessions happen online, so you can be somewhere you feel comfortable, and we go at whatever pace works for you. If we turn out not to be the right fit, we'll say so and help you find someone who is.
Not sure where to begin? Three questions will point you somewhere sensible →
Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a depth to be inhabited.— Maitreya
How we work
Three things shape everything we do here, and they're worth saying plainly before you read any further.
You're not a category, and two people who arrive using the same word for what's wrong often need very different things. Your counsellor will take the time to understand what's actually going on for you before deciding how to work with it.
That includes EMDR, somatic therapy, attachment work, depth psychology and trauma-informed practice. Your counsellor will explain what they're doing and why in ordinary language, so you're never left guessing what's happening in the room.
Coping strategies help you get through a difficult week and we'll give you those. But we're also interested in what sits underneath, because that's usually where the pattern lives, and working there is what tends to last.
What we work with
Most people arrive with one of these in mind, and many find it's connected to something they hadn't thought about. Either way, you don't need the right words before your first session.
When something overwhelming happens, your body does what it needs to do to get you through it, and then doesn't always switch off afterwards. We work with that directly, at whatever pace you can manage.
Learn more →EMDR helps your mind finish processing something it couldn't process at the time. It's one of the most researched trauma treatments there is, and it usually asks far less of you than telling the story over and over.
Learn more →You've probably tried the apps and the planners already. We'll build the practical side with you, and we'll also work on what tends to go unaddressed: the years of assuming you should find all this easier.
Learn more →Anxiety and depression are usually how something else shows up on the surface. Your symptoms are real and worth treating, and we'd rather work with what's driving them than teach you to live around them.
Learn more →Grief doesn't follow a schedule and it rarely looks the way you expect. Nobody here will hurry you through it or hand you a set of stages to work along.
Learn more →Most couples aren't really arguing about the thing they're arguing about. We help you see what's actually happening between you when it escalates, and what it would take to change it.
Learn more →Tiredness that sleep doesn't fix, boundaries nobody ever showed you how to set, and the way your sense of yourself shifts when your life does. An hour where you're not looking after anyone else.
Learn more →Anger that turns up before you've worked out what you're actually feeling, or a flatness where something used to be. Somewhere to say the thing you haven't said, to someone who won't lecture you about it.
Learn more →A separation, a diagnosis, a job that ended, a move you didn't want to make. The hardest stretch is usually afterwards, when the old life has gone and the new one hasn't arrived yet.
Learn more →A kundalini opening, a mystical experience that arrived without warning, a difficult ceremony, or a way of seeing the world that has quietly come apart. You need someone who recognises this.
Learn more →What we've seen
We say it because we watch it happen. People arrive convinced that what they're carrying is permanent, or that they should have got past it by now, and then over weeks and months something genuinely shifts. The constant watchfulness settles. The pattern loosens. The thing you've spent years organising your life around avoiding turns out to be something you can face after all.
It takes time, and parts of it are uncomfortable. But it happens, and you don't have to do any of it by yourself.
Client voices
I'd been in therapy before, and it was good therapy. But nothing had reached the layer this reached. It was the first time I felt properly seen rather than helped or managed.
— Rachel T., VancouverI came in after an experience that had taken my life apart. I didn't need it fixed, I needed someone who understood what had happened, and my counsellor did straight away without my having to explain it.
— M.K., TorontoGrief had been sitting in my chest for three years and I thought I'd dealt with it. By the third session I realised I'd only been managing it. What I expected to take months took weeks.
— David L., LondonRecognition
Awarded to Maitreya and to the wider Uncommon Wisdom™ work. Each of our counsellors also holds their own professional registration, which appears on your receipt.
What sets this practice apart
A kundalini awakening. A mystical experience that arrived without warning. A ceremony that went somewhere difficult. A way of understanding the world that has quietly come apart.
Most clinical settings read these as symptoms. Most spiritual communities treat them as unambiguously good and leave you alone inside something genuinely destabilising. Both leave you on your own in the middle of it.
This practice was built around that gap. Maitreya's own path began with a kundalini awakening in her early twenties, and our counsellors are trained to recognise these experiences — and to tell you honestly when what you're describing needs medical care instead.
Getting started
There's nothing to prepare and no forms to fill in. You're simply finding out how it feels to talk to this person, which is genuinely the only question that matters at this stage.
Sixty or ninety minutes, online. Your counsellor will ask what's brought you and what you'd like to be different. Nobody expects you to explain your whole life in one go.
Most people come weekly to begin with and then less often as things settle. Your counsellor will tell you what they're doing and why, and you can always say when something isn't working.
If it turns out not to be the right fit, just say so and we'll find you someone else at no cost. Around one person in five needs a second try, and nobody here takes it personally.
Wherever you are
Counselling is regulated where you sit, not where we do. So outside Canada we match you with a counsellor registered in your own country, and we tell you which register they're on and their number, so you can check it yourself.
Not ready yet
Most people who find this site aren't going to book today. Here's some of what we'd tell you if you were sitting in front of us, written to be useful on its own.
Nobody explains this beforehand, so most people arrive braced for something that isn't going to happen.
Read this →Therapy isn't the answer to everything, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
Read this →Both can look identical from outside. The distinction matters enormously, and getting it wrong causes real damage.
Read this →Worth Knowing
A letter every so often on the things people actually struggle with. No course to buy at the end of it, and one click to stop.
We never share your address, and we don't email often.
After that it's just a conversation with someone who's on your side. It's free, it takes fifteen minutes, and there's nothing you have to commit to at the end of it.