(She/Her)
Registered Psychotherapist
RP, CTP Dipl
Perhaps you keep ending up in the same place, no matter how hard you try to do things differently. Perhaps you know some truth about yourself or someone important to you, but facing it feels impossible. Perhaps you’re experiencing depression, surges of anger, the after-effects of trauma, or grappling with a sense that you’re living someone else’s life. Perhaps you long for a different relationship with your parent or adult child, but feel at a loss for how to begin.
These are some of the reasons people come to therapy, as experiencing these things can be confusing, difficult, frightening, or even exciting – and often very lonely. Therapy can help. It is a place where you can explore the truth of your experiences in a confidential and non-judgemental space. Through conversation and careful attention, we expand your awareness of yourself, make sense of why your life is the way it is, and explore what more might be possible to improve your emotional well-being.
This kind of work is not a quick fix, and it takes hard work—from you and from me. But it can also bring lasting change. For individuals, it can bring a feeling of being more present in your own life, increased resilience, more connection between different parts of yourself, more reality-based relationships. It can help you learn what you really want, and support you to move in that direction. For adult families, you may be able to repair very old wounds and have a different relationship with the time that remains.
Individual Therapy ($155/50 minute session)
I work with people on a weekly basis.
We will generally start with me getting to know a bit about your history—your family; your childhood; the cultures and communities you are part of; and anything else that is important for me to know from the start about who you are.
Once I have some of this background information, you will take the lead in our sessions, talking about what is most present for you. I will listen and share what comes to me when you speak. We will pay attention to your inner world and the outside world we live in, and how they each affect the other.
Our goal is for therapy to be somewhere for honest, brave, and free conversation, where you can explore and honour all of your experiences in the presence of another person. It’s important that anything at all can be discussed in our conversations, and that all of your feelings in their full complexity are welcome—your fear, your anger, your shame, your joy.
I take you and this work seriously and ask the same of you. What you bring is important, and will be treated that way.
Family Therapy – Adults and Adolescents ($170/50 minute session)
Relationships between family members are complex, and can be inescapable. Whether or not we live together (or ever have), the relationships between children and our caregivers stay with us for our lifetime. Prolonged conflict, estrangement, or ambiguous disconnection can all cause deep distress for everyone involved. More and more, adults and the people who raised them or were meant to raise them are looking for help from therapists to open communication where there has been rupture.
I work with families of adults (primarily parents/caregivers and their adult children) and parents with adolescents (13-17) who want to try and shift things in the way they relate to each other. I use the framework of Attachment Based Family Therapy to help you and your family members identify and work to heal attachment wounds.
For more than a decade, I worked in the non-profit sector running youth programming, doing project management, and fundraising. Working in a variety of large and small organizations with complex interpersonal dynamics made it clear to me that the inner lives and unconscious motivations of the people I worked with were what interested me most.
Following an in-depth academic and experiential training program through the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy (CTP), I became a Registered Psychotherapist with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO). I also hold a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard University.
My own life experiences as a parent, as a queer white cis woman born in Canada to South African parents, as a spouse, and a long-term therapy patient inevitably inform my view of the world. I am an intersectional and trans-inclusive feminist striving towards an anti-racist practice. Our similarities or differences in these areas or others may simply be present or may be useful in our work.
If you’d like to schedule a free 20-minute consultation to talk about whether we might work well together, or to set up a full 50-minute session, please send me an email at chiddy.therapy@gmail.com. During the week, I respond to messages within 24 hours.
1544 Danforth Ave., Toronto, ON, M4J 1N4