Blog
Weekly Reflections
A therapist blog with weekly posts from Vancouver-based therapists, writing online for clients and colleagues in BC and across Canada. Each week we share what we're noticing in the room, in the body, in the work itself. You'll find reflections on the questions we hold, the practices we return to, and the experiences that shape how we show up with clients, each other, and our communities. We also share updates from The Living Practice podcast. Come stay with what's emerging.
FEATURED
Featured Articles
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Naming What You've Felt: Recognizing Yourself as Neurodivergent in Adulthood
Recognizing yourself as neurodivergent in adulthood often arrives as body knowing before words. A somatic psychotherapist on what late ADHD and autistic recognition can hold: the relief, the grief, and why self-identification is valid in its own right.
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Reaching for AI at 3 a.m.: A Closer Look at the Research and What's Worth Knowing
Reaching for AI at 3 a.m.? You have company. A research-informed look at how people are using AI chatbots for emotional support, what the studies keep finding, where regulation stands, and what relational therapy still holds that a language model cannot.
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When the World Feels Uncertain: Existential Therapy for Climate Anxiety
Political instability, climate crisis, and rising hostility toward marginalized communities can leave us bracing for what comes next. Existential therapy offers grounded support for meaning, responsibility, and belonging in uncertain times.
ALL BLOG POSTS
All Articles
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What Happens When Life Won't Stay the Same: Online Therapy for "Lifequakes"
A life transition is not a project to manage. It is a period of loss and remaking. Online therapy across Canada for what comes up when the old shape of your life will not hold.
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Welcoming Laura Hoge, RSW: A New Chapter in Our Practice
Laura Hoge, RSW has joined Clayre Sessoms Psychotherapy Inc. full-time. She brings decades of embodied clinical work, LGBTQ community advocacy, graduate-level mentorship, and parent support for gender-diverse youth, alongside a deep commitment to justice-rooted care.
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Somatic Self-Care for Therapists: What Helps When You Carry So Much
Therapist self-care is not a bubble bath. It is the work of recovering your nervous system from the states you sit in with other people. A body-first approach to what helps in the small seams of a working day.
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Registered Psychotherapist (RP): What This Means for Therapy Across Canada
In 2021, I began the long process to become a Registered Psychotherapist with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario, years before BC had any plans to regulate the profession. Here's what that credential means, and what it offers you.
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Divorce as a 2STGNC+ Parent: What Often Surfaces, and What Can Help
The weight of this kind of divorce is often bigger than the relationship itself, because identity, family, and institutions shift at once. A reflection on what often surfaces for 2STGNC+ parents in separation, and what individual therapy can and cannot hold.
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Working With a Student Therapist: What Care Looks Like When Supervision Is Close
What close supervision actually looks like in our practice, and what it can mean for you when your therapist is a practicum student. The texture of supervised work, the kind of attention it carries, and what to know before booking with Laith.
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When Your Trans or Nonbinary Kid Is a Teenager: What These Years Ask of You
The coming-out conversation asks a lot. The years that follow ask something different. A post for parents past the big moment and somewhere in the actual years of raising a trans or nonbinary teenager, with reflections shaped by Laura Hoge's work.
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When You're Not Sure You're Trans Enough: Notes on Self-Esteem as a Trans Adult
The quiet voice that asks "am I trans enough?" is familiar to many trans adults. It rarely responds to affirmations. What does help, and where it comes from. A post about trans self-esteem that refuses the usual self-help framing.
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Making Room for Gender Joy: Notes from a Trans and Nonbinary Therapist
Gender joy isn't a reward for surviving enough. It's a compass. A trans and nonbinary therapist's reflection on letting play, pleasure, and possibility take up room in transition, alongside the real weight of the journey.
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Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST): A Parts Approach to Therapy
What TIST is, how it differs from IFS, who it is for, and why it reaches clients who have been told they are untreatable. Written by a Senior Facilitator of TIST chosen by Dr. Janina Fisher to help train and certify practitioners.
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When the Weight Doesn't Lift: Treatment-Resistant Depression and the Role of Trauma
Up to 40 per cent of people with depression do not respond to standard treatments. For many, the depression is a trauma response, and standard care was never designed to reach that layer. What that looks like, and what helps, from a senior facilitator of TIST.
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Chronic Pain and the Nervous System: Why It Hurts and What Can Help
Chronic pain is often a learned pattern in the nervous system, not a signal that something is currently damaged. The research has shifted substantially in the last several years, and therapeutic approaches now reach what medical care cannot.
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Decolonizing Therapy in Practice: What We're Doing, and Still Learning
Decolonizing therapy isn't a destination we've reached. It's an ongoing, accountable practice shaped by many teachers. Here's what that looks like in our work, what we're still learning, and where else to look for care.
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What Jealousy in Polyamory Is Actually Trying to Tell You
Jealousy in polyamorous and open relationships isn't a leftover to dissolve. It's a signal from your body. A gentle look at what your feelings might actually be saying, and what softens when you listen to them instead of managing them away.
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When Joy and Grief Coexist: Notes on Transitioning and What We May Quietly Grieve
There is often a part of transition almost nobody talks about, because it sits in a strange place next to all the joy. The grief. Notes on ambiguous loss, on euphoria and grief living together, and on leaning toward joy as an act of persistence.
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When You Don't Feel Queer Enough, You Still Belong Here
If you've ever felt not queer enough in your own body, you're not alone. A gentle look at where that pressure comes from, what it asks of you, and what starts to soften when you let your body off the hook.
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On Being Visibly Trans and Disabled: Notes from Someone Who Lives It
Notes from a therapist who was born blind, is severely visually impaired, neurodivergent, and visibly trans. On what it is actually like to live at the intersection of disability and trans identity, what the research says, and what helps.
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What the Disability Justice Principles Ask of Care: Notes on Putting It Into Practice
The ten principles of disability justice, credited to Patty Berne and Sins Invalid, are not decoration. They ask something specific of care. Notes from a disabled therapist on what they have asked of me, and of anyone trying to offer or receive care shaped by them.
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How Disability Justice Shapes Our Therapy Practice: A Place to Start
How disability justice has shaped how we practise as therapists. A starting place for new readers with specifics on who leads, how we build access, how we pace the body's work, and how we hold intersecting identities. Links to deeper reading throughout.
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Relationship Therapy in BC and Online in Canada for Open, CNM, and Poly Partners
Relationship therapy for open, CNM, and poly partners in Canada. We hold the whole configuration: partners, metamours, the structure itself. Non-monogamy isn't the problem, and we won't coach you back to monogamy.