Your First Online Therapy Session: What to Expect When You Begin With Us

You've found a name. You've filled out the consult form. There is a video link in your calendar for next week. And you are wondering what the first session is actually like here. Whether you are expected to arrive with something prepared. Whether you will spend the hour answering intake questions. Whether this is going to feel like another place that tells you how you should be.

I want to answer those questions directly, in a way that is specific to how we work. I am a Vancouver-based therapist, and this practice is online across Canada. Everyone who begins with me starts the same way. A free 15-minute consult first, then a full first session if it feels right. What follows is what happens in that first session, what it is, and what we try for it not to be.

What we do together at the beginning

Getting to know each other, slowly

A first session is mostly conversation. It is not a checklist, not a battery of assessment questions, not a long intake form read aloud. You tell me what brought you here, in your own words, in whatever order makes sense to you. I listen, I ask a few questions along the way, and I tell you a little about how I work so you can decide whether it feels like a fit.

A first session here usually includes some version of:

• You saying what brought you here, in your own words, at whatever pace feels right
• A conversation about how I work, including the kind of therapy I do and how I think about it
• Some brief questions about what you have tried before, what has helped, what has not
• A loose exploration of what you are hoping this can help with, with no pressure to land on a clean answer
• Practical logistics, such as scheduling, pacing, and how consults and sessions fit together

Nothing here is rapid. If you arrive exhausted, we can work at the pace of exhausted. If you arrive nervous, we can start with that. If the clearest thing you can say is "something is off and I do not know what," that is enough to start.

You are the one who knows you

This is the part I want to be specific about, because it shapes everything else.

You are the only one in the room who has lived your life. You are the only expert on what has happened to you, how it has landed, and what you have had to do to get through it. Whatever I know about therapy, about trauma, about identity, about bodies, all of it is in service of listening to you more clearly. It is not a set of answers I am going to deliver about your life.

I will offer observations. I will sometimes name something I notice that you might not have named yet. I will share framings that could be useful. But none of that overrides what you know. If something I say does not fit, please tell me. If I get something wrong, please tell me that too. This is collaborative work, and it does not function if I am positioned as the one with the right answer. You get to correct me. I will not be defensive about it.

Talking about hopes, not treatment goals

At some point in the first session or two, we will talk about what you are hoping this work can help with. Sometimes that is specific. Processing a loss. Finding your way through a transition. Understanding a pattern that keeps showing up. Sometimes it is less specific. Being able to hear yourself think again. Feeling less alone. Having somewhere to put things down.

I ask about hopes, not "treatment goals" in the clinical sense. Goals pinned down too early tend to be the wrong ones. Real ones emerge over time. What I want to understand is the shape of what is underneath and what a small shift in that shape might open up. If you are not sure, we can begin there too.

What we try not to do

Therapy is not a neutral space. I do not think it ever has been. Psychotherapy as a field has a long and often harmful history of telling people, especially women, queer people, trans people, Indigenous people, people of colour, disabled people, and poor people, who they are supposed to be, what a healthy life is supposed to look like, and where their suffering supposedly comes from, and then calling that science. We are still inside that history.

What I try to do, in this practice, is not pretend otherwise. Feminist therapy traditions have been naming this for over five decades, and a lot of how I work comes from there, including the relational-cultural therapy tradition at Wellesley. Power is in the room whether we name it or not. I am the one paid to be here. I am the one with the clinical credentials. I am the one whose notes enter a chart. That asymmetry is real. It does not go away because the session is on Zoom, or because I am warm, or because I am queer and trans myself.

What changes is whether I pay attention to it. So I try to. I try not to assume I know what your experience has meant. I try not to interpret too quickly. I try not to name a diagnosis as though it explains you, when mostly a diagnosis is a code for insurance and a starting point for research. I try not to hurry you through something your body is clearly not ready to leave. I try to be specific about what I do and do not know, and about what is a suggestion versus a recommendation. And I try to keep space open for you to push back on me.

A word on taking your session from outside

Online therapy is not a compromise. For many people it works better than office therapy. You can take a session from home, from a car in a parking lot on your lunch break, from a back porch, a garden, a cabin, a quiet trail overlooking the water. I have had first sessions happen from picnic tables, from parked trucks with the windows down, from a bench in the shade of a big-leaf maple. Something about being in a place your body already knows can help the work land. You do not have to perform being in therapy.

What matters is that the connection is stable and that the space feels private enough to speak honestly. Beyond that, where you sit is up to you.

If this feels like the kind of beginning you want

If the way I am describing this resonates, the way in is a short consult first, so we can feel out whether we are a fit before you commit to a full session. I do not want to be the right therapist for everyone. I want to be the right therapist for the people I actually am the right therapist for, and I trust you to know the difference.

The practice offers somatic therapy online across Canada. You do not need a formal diagnosis, a doctor's referral, or a particular identity to begin. You need the willingness to show up for an hour and to say what is actually true for you. That is the whole beginning.