
Meet Casey

Welcome!
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Are you feeling stuck with lingering bad feelings?
Replaying painful experiences in your mind?
Living your life in shame and guilt?
I feel fulfilled in my work supporting clients through life’s darkest moments. From witnessing the natural process of healing, I believe in the resilience of human beings to recover from adversity. However, some life events are too painful to process alone. We are meant to rely on others during difficult times and I would be honoured to be part of your healing journey.
I am a Registered Psychologist with a Master’s degree in Counselling Psychology from the University of Alberta and additional training in evidence-based therapies: Emotion Focused Therapy, EMDR, Prolonged Exposure Therapy, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. My nine years of counselling and clinical experience ranges from Alberta Health Services, crisis support centres, post secondary institutions and private practice. I regularly engage in professional development and consultation to further refine my therapeutic skills. I also firmly believe in practicing the same skills I teach my clients.
Counselling Services
Approaches to Counselling

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I work with adults 18+ who are feeling stuck with lingering bad feelings, who are replaying emotionally charged and potentially traumatic experiences and who are holding a lot of shame and guilt for life experiences and common reactions to same.
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It takes a lot of courage to think about painful experiences in therapy and express emotions you typically want to hide away. My primary aim, especially in the beginning stages of therapy, is to create a safe and trusting therapy relationship through warmth, compassion and shared humour to build comfort with being vulnerable. Individuals who have faced prejudice and discrimination based on aspects of their identity naturally have heightened difficulties with safety and trust. I welcome all individuals regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion or spirituality, ability and any other identities.
I tailor counselling to meet each individual’s specific needs through collaborating on goals, incorporating individual beliefs about healing and consistently asking for feedback.
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Emotion Focused Therapy

Emotion Focused Therapy, an evidence based approach, informs the majority of the therapeutic work I provide. Emotions are evolutionarily adaptive and provide important information to guide us towards what we need most in life. Unfortunately, most of us have not learned how to utilize the wisdom of our emotions from a young age. The tendency for most of my clients, without adequate support in processing emotions, is to push down painful feelings through staying very busy, overworking, drinking, overeating or conversely starving themselves, purging, engaging in self-harm or thinking about death as an escape from emotions. Feelings of shame and worthlessness further exacerbate the urge to push down painful emotions and memories. Although it is understandable to want to escape pain, avoidance and invalidation of emotions lead to persistent, lingering bad feelings. Healing occurs by learning to experience emotions, initially in the safety of the therapy room, in order to identify the wise and adaptive information and/or to transform stuck, unhelpful emotions. I guide people through experiential activities to aid in emotion processing and I teach emotion regulation skills to utilize in daily life. The pace of exploring emotions is set by each individual client as I acknowledge how uncomfortable feelings are for most of my clients. I supplement Emotion Focused Therapy with self-compassion strategies as well as skill building from Dialectical Behavioural Therapy when appropriate and helpful.
EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) has a strong research base demonstrating its effectiveness for helping clients to recover from trauma and distressing life events that impair life functioning and may result in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and other mental health concerns.
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The foundation of EMDR is the belief that humans have an innate, adaptive ability to heal through difficulties. When traumatic or disturbing life experiences overwhelm the nervous system, it can disrupt the natural ability to process and integrate these experiences in an adaptive manner. These negative experiences are processed and encoded into memory incompletely, resulting in vivid and fragmented memories that feel as if they are being “relived” all over again when recalled.
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After an assessment of symptoms and an adequate preparation phase, EMDR involves revisiting difficult memories while concurrently stimulating both sides of the brain via side-to-side eye movements, sounds or tapping. Research has demonstrated that this bilateral stimulation can reduce the vividness and emotionality associated with distressing memories, making it easier to revisit these memories and allowing for adaptive processing. EMDR processing heals at multiple levels: cognitive, emotional, sensory and body-based. EMDR does not require a detailed description of distressing events to be effective.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy

Prolonged Exposure Therapy is an extensively researched treatment approach demonstrated to be effective for treating chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and associated depression, anxiety and anger symptoms.
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Traumatic events disrupt the memory encoding process resulting in memories that are vivid, fragmented, sensory and produce a sense of "nowness," as if the traumatic event were relived all over again when recalled. In the natural recovery process, trauma symptoms reduce gradually over time as individuals allow themselves to face their traumatic memories and continue to engage in activities that may have environmental reminders of the traumatic event despite the initial intense fear. Individuals who cope with traumatic events by avoiding painful memories and reminders (i.e. people, places, objects, things and events associated with the traumatic events) have a greater likelihood of developing PTSD and their worlds become more narrow and restricted.
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Intrusive memories of traumatic events are understandably difficult to tolerate. Prolonged Exposure Therapy provides a structured approach to gradually and safely helps clients to face traumatic events and associated stimuli. During the initial stage of treatment, clients learn about their trauma symptoms and select avoided activities to gradually approach to increase life functioning. As early as session three, clients are invited to narrate the details of their traumatic event(s) each session followed by processing of the thoughts and feelings that arise from the experience. Clients are never coerced into treatment activities and may ask to pause at anytime. Watch this video for an overview of Prolonged Exposure Therapy.