Frequent Areas of Support
I welcome clients of all personal, relational, spiritual, cultural, and social identities. I’m neurodiversity-affirming and bring my own lived experiences to my work.
Below is information about some of the areas I provide support in most frequently.
I’m a Canadian Certified Counsellor (C.C.C.) and a Victim’s Services verified counsellor.
If you have questions, feel free to connect with me through email ( asutton.contact@gmail.com ) or text / call 306.620.8394
Neurodiversity
Neurodiversity can be interesting and fulfilling. But living, working, and socializing in a largely neuro-typical world can create challenges, distress, and confusion.
Therapy helps clients see and understand their strengths. We explore how they can live authentically, identify their preferences, and notice and trust the signals their body is sending them to reduce burnout and increase comfort and confidence.
As a neurodivergent individual, I help clients feel secure and in-tune with themselves. Clients define their own success and find more pleasure and control in executive functioning, academic, social, and professional aspects of day-to-day life as they practice self-advocacy. Therapy can be more impactful and enjoyable when the therapist and client experience the world in similar ways and have a shared language.
Together, we identify interests, skills, and learning styles to know what makes them tick. Clients create flow by tapping into how their energy, focus, and motivation naturally exist. We work through negative beliefs and emotions that hold them back from feeling worthy in their life or relationships. Clients discover what environments, relationships, activities, and jobs serve, value, and fulfill them so they can show up in those spaces and relationships as they intend.
For families, differences between how neurotypical and neurodivergent people experience the world and relationships can increase conflict, misunderstanding, anxiety and loneliness. Parenting a neurodivergent child—or being a neurodivergent parent—can be challenging since many enjoyable ways to move in the world are less known or accessible for neurodivergent kids/parents. Therapy helps families understand, communicate, and care for themselves and each other while supporting everyone’s preferences and needs.
Being in tune with oneself and occupying space authentically can be a part of increasing the joy, safety, and meaning in life.
Change, Identity, and Meaning
Our world, relationships, and understanding of ourselves are always changing. Sometimes these changes happen slowly, and sometimes very suddenly.
Therapy helps people connect deeply with the joy of getting to know themselves in and through the different phases of their life. It’s also a space to understand and sit safely with the challenging experiences of grief, loss, fear, regret, and anger that may be a part of change.
Exploring emotions, fears, and beliefs allows clients to reduce distress stemming from depression, anxiety, shame, and grief. As clients become more familiar with themselves or their changing circumstances, they’re able to tap into their preferences, see their experiences with new understanding, and turn their gaze to the future.
Clients are encouraged to question and evaluate the intent and value of norms, roles, and expectations as they make decisions. Narrative and existential therapy are frequently used to connect clients to their sense of control and purpose.
Literature, music, art and other creative expressions are welcome in session as clients connect to their Self and circumstances and find self-acceptance and confidence.
Work related to a person’s individual and shared identities and communities—such as neurodivergence, gender, sexual, relational, cultural, religious/spiritual, and social memberships are a welcome and enriching part of the work clients may choose to do in session.
Responding to changes in one’s life or identity is, in part, a celebration of choice. Clients align with their values and find or make meaning in their world.
Family Planning, Infertility, and Loss
Family planning involves unique and intense emotional, physical, financial, and social experiences.
I work with clients to process emotions and understand the personal, social, and relational impact of their experiences. For many, the uncertainty, grief, hope, anger, and fear can feel isolating and even unbearable. The physical and emotional experiences of planning, pregnancy, infertility, and loss are significant parts of a client’s life story. Therapy can provide a way to understand and share experiences, and honour the memories and people involved.
In session clients often feel relief, free of any expectation to hurry their grief, hide their anger, or manage other’s comfort. We pay attention to noticing individual needs, working through anxieties, and communicating preferences. For couples, therapy provides a space to speak openly and honestly about difficult or painful topics compassionately.
When clients are focused on the demands and experiences of family planning or loss, their own identities can be overshadowed. When evolving needs, interests, and hopes are given attention, challenges, strengths, and choices are better understood, too.
Grief, in all of its forms, is one of the most natural and chaotic human experiences. In therapy, we don’t look to remedy it as much as we look to make room for it.
Parenthood
The emotional experiences and shift in identity that occur in parenthood are monumental.
All experiences of parenting are unique. There’s no way to prepare or predict the personal experience of parenting until one is in it. For birth persons, the additional demands or trauma on their bodies can complicate the experience. In an instant, personal, relational, and social dynamics change and clients must navigate an entirely unfamiliar role and sense of identity.
Parenting can trigger behaviours, feelings, and beliefs that clients didn’t realize were present. Often, clients come to understand their own childhood dynamics, trauma or beliefs/patterns by attending counselling. Couples or co-parents are able to identify their values and parenting philosophies and communicate their preferences to each other. Doing so can reduce anxiety and conflict for parents and increase security for children.
Therapy provides a safe space to acknowledge the personal difficulties, stresses, resentment, and grief that often presents in parenthood. Clients explore how to maintain their personal identity and meet their own needs while parenting in a meaningful way.
Parenting is mostly a solo expedition, yet we carry the expectations, hopes, and pain of our children, ourselves, and the generations past. In it all, therapy offers a quiet space to connect with our own values and intuition.
Caregiving & End-of-Life Care
Familial relationships are multi-dimensional—one can be a caregiver and a child to the same person.
Becoming a caregiver to others—such as siblings or aging or ill family members or parents, can feel overwhelming and fill clients with doubt. Identifying concerns, feelings, and beliefs can be helpful in decision-making and reducing stress.
Clients often feel shame, guilt, or resentment about their caregiving role. For couples, conflict can arise when the worries, demands, or financial and social limitations associated with the role impact the relationship. In session, clients find comfort in sharing their concerns and preferences and couples often find ways to balance their needs with those of the people they’re caring for and decrease isolation.
End of life care can be particularly exhausting, emotionally and physically. Therapy helps clients honour the desires of their loved ones while balancing their own needs, goals, and sense of identity. Therapy is also available for sibling groups or families experiencing stress, grief, or conflict related to end-of-life care or decision making.
Caring for someone at the end of their life is a complicated task—we are simultaneously caring for and grieving the same person. All this can lead to fatigue. Therapy provides a place to rest and process those dualities.
Trauma
Trauma can arise from a single event or prolonged distressing experiences.
Trauma creates emotional distress and impacts the nervous system. People use therapy to resolve trauma from various experiences, like childhood or relational abuse and neglect, racism, social, cultural, or systemic harms, and loss.
Sometimes, trauma is more easily recognized when a single, significant event (like a car accident) occurs. Complex trauma results from cumulative experiences of distress or threat. The distress may be denied, normalized, or invisible to others. As clients process their emotions, they understand what circumstances contribute to or reduce their distress.
Common distress includes hypervigilance, sleep issues, anxiety, and negative beliefs or self-blame. Unresolved or on-going trauma may contribute to substance abuse, self-harm, depression, anxiety, hopelessness, disassociation, borderline personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Therapy can help reduce distress and increase personal, relational, and social well-being.
Using art, music, writing, or other expressive activities can be beneficial to processing and be grounding for clients in session. EMDR therapy can accelerate the processing and recovery from trauma for some clients.
I am a verified counsellor through Victim’s Services—clients should connect with Victim’s Services to confirm their funding and request for coverage to arrange billing and payment with me prior to sessions.
The profound impact of trauma can interfere with how people are able to engage in their world. Increasing safety and working compassionately can help clients recover.
