The therapy room is not neutral.

I am a white settler and a regulated psychotherapist. I hold educational, professional and institutional power. I am also queer, neurodivergent and non-binary trans, with lived experience of coming out later in life and being a parent.

I am a white settler and a regulated psychotherapist. Those positions bring educational, professional and institutional power. I am also queer, neurodivergent and non-binary trans. I came out later in life, and I am a parent. Parenthood has been one of my greatest teachers about care, responsibility and how deeply we shape one another.

My class story is not one neat thing. I was raised across working- and middle-class parts of my family, including periods of financial precarity and living below the poverty line. I now hold middle-class and professional privilege. I currently move through the world as able-bodied while living with a managed chronic illness.

All of this comes into the room with me. Some parts of your experience may feel familiar to me; others won’t. Shared identities do not mean shared stories, and I do not want what I do not know to become your job to teach me. My responsibility is to stay curious, keep learning and be honest about the edges of what I can offer—including when another practitioner may be able to meet you in ways I cannot.

Psychotherapy and medicine have a long history of pathologizing, controlling and gatekeeping queer and trans lives. That history is not over; it continues to shape cultural beliefs, diagnostic systems and access to care. Queer and trans lives are not problems for therapy to solve. Affirming practice requires more than using the right language—it means refusing to make therapy another place where people must prove who they are.

Anti-trans legislation, policy and rhetoric create real and pressing harm. I do not treat this as “just politics,” and I believe therapists have a responsibility to oppose it.

My work is politically informed, and I stay informed with political conditions because the work we do in therapy can never be understood without an ever evolving understanding of the ways the oppressive systems we live within impact us. That said I am not a movement organizer, and activism is not the centre of my practice. Therapy, healing and continuing to learn how to do this work well are the centre of my professional life.

No queer or trans person owes anyone activism. You are allowed to protect yourself, remain private, rest, seek joy and build an ordinary life.

Your gender does not need to be certain, consistent, public or recognizable to anyone else. I will not assume transition or coming out are your desired goals. You are the authority on your gender—including when your understanding changes.

Learn more about anti-trans policy and rhetoric and anti-trans legislation in Canada

Sexual shame is not accidental. White supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism all shape who is held up as desirable, whose sexuality is treated as normal, and whose bodies, relationships and desires are cast as dangerous, excessive or deviant.

Shame divides us. It keeps us hidden—from ourselves and one another—and makes it harder to know what we want, name our boundaries, ask for care or imagine other possibilities. Capitalism is always ready to sell us a way to become more desirable, more “normal” or more “acceptable.”

Pleasure and desire can also bring us into deeper relationship—with ourselves, our imaginations and one another. They can be places of play, curiosity, power, connection and aliveness. This is part of why they matter politically: when we can feel and name our own longings, we have more room to choose a life that has not simply been prescribed or sold to us.

Liberation includes claiming what you want, feel and enjoy—and what you don’t want. No consensual sexuality is made more worthy by being conventional. There is no sexual finish line you are supposed to cross—not orgasm, a certain frequency of sex or a body that responds on command.

You decide what in your sexuality feels fulfilling, what you want to keep and what—if anything—you want to change.

Kink can offer play, identity affirmation and exploration, creativity, ritual, increased sensation awareness, an exploration of power, surrender, tenderness, connection—or something else entirely. I am interested in what it means to you and how it lives in your life.

If you want to explore whether your kink and trauma are connected, we can. They may be deeply intertwined or have nothing to do with each other. If something you enjoy is connected to trauma, that does not automatically make it unhealthy.

I care about whether people have room to choose, communicate, attend to risk and treat one another with care—not whether their desires look conventional. Consent and power can be complex, negotiated and ongoing rather than reduced to a simple checklist.

Something can be pleasurable and meaningful while also causing harm; these truths do not cancel one another out. Whether a kink feels life-giving, joyful, complicated, distressing, difficult to control or harmful, we can explore what it is doing in your life and what relationship you want with it—with curiosity, honesty and room for complexity.

I do not believe any particular caring, consensual and communicative relationship structure is inherently more mature or evolved than another. Consensual non-monogamy is not better or worse than monogamy. Nor, in my view, is non-hierarchical CNM inherently better than CNM with a hierarchy. What makes sense, feels good and is sustainable in your life is what matters.

Consensual non-monogamy does not require you to become need-free, never feel jealous or experience compersion. Having hard feelings does not mean you are failing at it.

I will not automatically treat jealousy as an obstacle to conquer or a boundary as covert control. We can work with attachment alarm, grief, inherited relationship beliefs, uneven power dynamics and shifting priorities while helping you remain connected to yourself—and contend with the truly unreasonable number of calendars CNM can bring.

Couple privilege, cultural hierarchy and power can shape whose relationship is protected, whose time is considered flexible, whose needs count and who gets a say. Different relationship structures can all be valid, but our families, institutions, laws and culture do not treat them equally. I believe these dynamics need to be recognized in the therapy room.

Sexual freedom includes the freedom not to want sex. Asexuality and grey sexuality are not deficiencies, incomplete identities or problems waiting to be solved.

Sexual attraction, desire, arousal, touch, romance and intimacy are not one bundle that everyone experiences in the same way. Ace people can enjoy sex, want no sex, enjoy kink, pursue romantic or queerplatonic relationships, practise polyamory or build lives that centre none of these things. There is no single ace story.

Asexuality is not the same as low or changing desire. But low desire, fluctuating desire and changes in sexual interest do not inherently need fixing either. I will not assume that an absence or change in desire must be explained by trauma, medication, hormones or a relationship problem.

You do not need to prove an ace identity, choose a permanent label or come out to anyone. If you want to understand something about your attraction or desire, we can explore it. I will meet you where you are and support you to understand what feels true and supportive for you.

Neurodivergence can shape sensory needs, desire, attention, initiation, transitions, communication, pacing and the need for novelty, predictability or recovery time. It can also bring creativity, playfulness, directness, intense pleasure and distinctive ways of connecting. Sometimes needs that appear contradictory—spontaneity and preparation, novelty and familiarity, closeness and less sensory input—are both real.

Much relationship and sexuality advice assumes people can easily recognize desire, shift into touch, sustain attention, tolerate expected sensations, communicate in conventional ways and make intimacy happen on schedule. When Autistic, ADHD and AuDHD people do not fit that script, they can be misread as disinterested, avoidant, selfish or dysfunctional.

I have ADHD. Autism and AuDHD are also woven through my closest relationships, and I recognize many autistic traits in myself, although I have not been formally assessed. This gives me personal and relational points of understanding—not a complete understanding of anyone else’s neurodivergence.

Therapy should make room for the mind, body, relationships and nervous system you actually have—and help you discover what connection, sexuality and pleasure can look like when they are shaped around you.

Our bodies, lives and sexualities do not stay still. Illness, injury, pregnancy, parenthood, caregiving, medication, hormones, menopause, aging, pain and fatigue can change how desire feels, how sex works and what becomes possible. These changes may bring grief and frustration, as well as curiosity, invention and new forms of pleasure and connection.

There is no ideal sexual body and no correct sexual timeline. No one’s sexuality should be measured against an earlier version of their body or a narrow idea of how bodies are supposed to look, respond or function. Disabled people determine what sexual autonomy, pleasure, access and support mean in their own lives.

This is a commitment, not a claim that I have expertise across the enormous range of disabled experience. I currently move through the world as able-bodied. My responsibility is to keep learning from disabled people and disability-justice leadership, respond honestly to access needs and recognize when someone needs support beyond what I can competently offer.

Some sex workers love their work; some do not. Some want to leave, some want to stay, and some feel differently from one day to the next. Like other work, sex work can be satisfying, exhausting, sustaining, exploitative, joyful, boring, complicated—or several of these at once.

Sex workers are the authorities on what their work means in their own lives. Whether sex work brings you to therapy or has nothing to do with why you are here, you do not need to hide it, defend it, or educate me about why it is legitimate.

I support sex workers’ rights, self-determination and full decriminalization. Criminalization and stigma do not make sex work safer; they increase isolation, surveillance and barriers to care.

I am continuing to learn from sex-worker-led movements, and I will not mistake being affirming for knowing more about sex work than the people doing it.

Questioning therapy is part of how I care for the practice—and for the people who trust me within it. Therapy can offer relationship, language, witnessing and possibilities that change lives. I believe in its value without treating it as neutral, universally applicable or the whole of healing.

Modern Western psychotherapy emerged from particular histories of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. It can turn responses to oppression into individual symptoms or quietly reinforce norms around gender, sexuality, bodies, relationships, ability and productivity. Diagnostic language and evidence-based models can be useful, but they are culturally situated tools—not objective truths that fit everyone. Therapists also hold real power; professionalism and claims of neutrality can hide that power rather than make it disappear.

Healing is larger than individual recovery, and we were never meant to do it only in one private room with one other person. We heal through community, relationships, movement, creativity, sound, touch, culture, collective action and rest. Therapy can be a meaningful part of that wider ecology of care not the whole of it.

For me, practising responsibly means continuing my own personal therapeutic work, continued professional development, supervision and consultation; questioning what I was taught; and recognizing when a model—or I—am not what someone needs. Therapy is a relational practice that must keep being practised, examined and changed.

Colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism cultivate perfectionism, exhaustion, isolation and distress. Capitalism then sells care back to us as an individual purchase. These systems teach us that rest must be earned and that our value lies in what we produce. Resting before everything is finished—or before you are exhausted—is a skill and an act of resistance.

I do not treat rest, pacing or sustainability as failures of motivation, or value them only because they might increase productivity. Slowing down enough to notice where you need care, what matters, the reality of your limits and where joy might live—or simply to be—is part of being awake to life.

Psychological care should be publicly funded and available regardless of income. It is not. Private therapy at fees like mine is inaccessible to many people. My fee lets me support myself while keeping my caseload sustainable enough to remain present, creative and thoughtful. I offer limited lower-fee spaces, groups and workshops to widen access, but they cannot change a system that rations care according to income.

This also shapes how I relate to therapists and people I may supervise. Psychotherapy is now populated largely by women, many of them white, yet remains shaped by white patriarchy: care work associated with women is routinely underpaid, overloaded and expected to absorb suffering quietly. Many therapists bring their own trauma histories to this work; the empathy, endurance and vigilance that draw people here can be exploited within institutions that offer too little relational support and rely too heavily on hierarchy, compliance and punishment.

Care does not become more ethical when it depends on someone’s depletion. I want to model that caring deeply about resisting colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism does not require chronic exhaustion or cycles of burnout. I am building a practice in which sustainability is not a retreat from justice but part of how I practise it.

White supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, and state violence reinforce one another. The movements resisting them are connected, but not interchangeable. Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, Palestinian liberation, disability justice, fat liberation, sex-worker rights, queer and trans liberation, abolition and climate justice each carry distinct histories, leadership and demands.

I stand for Black liberation and anti-racism, Indigenous sovereignty and Palestinian liberation. I oppose the genocide of Palestinians, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the dehumanization used to justify state violence. Criticism of the actions of the Israeli state is not inherently antisemitic.

As a white settler living in Tkaronto, I benefit from ongoing colonialism. Indigenous sovereignty asks more of me than a land acknowledgement: learning my treaty responsibilities, following Indigenous leadership and offering material support. Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty are distinct struggles, and I have particular responsibilities to each.

I am learning from abolitionist and transformative-justice approaches that ask us to respond to harm without treating policing, incarceration or punishment as inevitable. Accountability matters; punishment and accountability are not the same.

I am not a movement organizer or an expert in every struggle I name. My knowledge and involvement are uneven, and my learning is ongoing. I try to make these commitments material through recurring financial support, changes in my professional practice, continued learning, consultation and referrals. I do not require clients to be activists. This is not a claim to political purity; it is a commitment to keep noticing what my values ask of me—and to act where I can.

What I say on this page should be visible in the choices I make with you. In my work:

• You are the primary authority on your identities, body and life. My training gives me knowledge and perspective; it does not make me the expert on you.

• I do not assume that monogamy, couplehood, conventional sex, sexual desire, orgasm, medical transition, coming out, thinness, sobriety or productivity should be your goal.

• When social and structural forces are part of the problem, I name them rather than locating everything inside you.

• Consent is ongoing—including around therapeutic exercises, body-based work and the direction of therapy. You can decline, pause or change course.

• Coping and survival strategies are approached with curiosity rather than shame. Stopping a behaviour is not automatically the only acceptable goal.

• Your privacy matters. I do not use AI to record, listen to or transcribe sessions, and I do not enter client-specific information into AI systems. I may use AI to develop generic templates; your clinical notes are written by me.

• I pay attention to the authority I hold as a therapist and make room for disagreement and feedback. I will also acknowledge when someone would be better supported by a practitioner with different lived experience or expertise.

These are practices I must keep returning to—not proof that I will never get something wrong.