Practice Philosophy:
Hi, I’m Beki, and I’m honoured you’re considering inviting me into your journey towards self-belonging, the realisation of your potential and the full development of your abilities and appreciation for life. Firstly, I’d like to respectfully acknowledge that I live and practice on the unceded territory and ancestral lands of the Syilx Peoples.
I strive to create an authentic and attuned connection with you, as relationships are fundamental to the development of long lasting personal growth and healing. My clinical practice primarily focuses on working with folks who want to create a rich and meaningful life after trauma, the symptoms of which can take on many forms: feeling a deep sense of shame and responsibility for what happened, feeling like you’re fundamentally flawed, flashbacks, nightmares, or intensified and unpredictable fluctuations in your emotions are all common reactions after surviving trauma.
I believe healing is possible when we are able to explore, be curious and learn from our triggers and emotional pain without shame and judgement. Through the lens of Compassionate Inquiry, I have learned that trauma “shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds.” Essentially, trauma manifests as a disconnect from the self and oftentimes, our gut feelings. That means that my work is in assisting and guiding you back to their authentic and whole selves. Our pain and struggle often requires an attuned, abiding compassionate witness to hold a space of non-judgment and genuine warmth and THAT is the backbone of my professional philosophy. In addition to these attributes, my practice modalities and clinical approaches are evidence-based and ethically sound.
While relational, psychodynamic talk-based therapy is important and necessary, trauma is believed to live unprocessed in the body and requires a deeper somatic experience to shift the emotional blockages so that they do not potentially manifest into inflammation or intensified physiological chronic illness down the road. To deny emotion is to be controlled by it. When it goes out of our consciousness it doesn’t go away, it goes into our bodies and influences us without our awareness or consent. My professional training is rooted in exploring how to unblock these unprocessed, implicit memories, providing not only emotional freedom and relief but also going beyond that; finding a place of empowerment, self-belonging, and mindful presence.
We often find maladaptive ways to cope with our pain. Perhaps you are finding emotional refuge in hiding behind aggression and anger or perhaps you are finding comfort in withdrawing and isolating. Or, perhaps the pain is being numbed with substance misuse. When it comes to an addiction, of any sort, we must examine the underlying function of the addictive behaviour because these problematic behaviours are usually rooted in maladaptive coping strategies symptomatic of deeper issues.
Doing the healing work requires an exploration of past conditioning and negatively held core beliefs, relationships and distorted world views. We must “make friends” with the parts of ourselves that we may have denied or repressed to keep attachments safe. With that said, it is just as important to gain a skill set of unlearning, too! Over time, old thought patterns start to not serve us any longer and we may require guidance in order to see, more clearly, those patterns so that we can begin to question them. That way we can begin to create and strengthen new neural pathways and build resiliency.
It’s almost always the case that whatever has wounded us will also be instrumental in our healing. I am here to offer a safely guided exploration of these wounds and pain. We are not meant to do this deep inner work alone and I would be honoured to walk alongside you.