Our Values

 Counsellors/therapists have a fundamental ethical responsibility to take every reasonable precaution to respect and to safeguard their clients’ right to confidentiality, and to protect from inappropriate disclosure, any information generated within the counselling/therapy relationship. We understand the importance of confidentiality with your care.

We value the concept of curiosity rather than judgement in the therapy room. Curiosity is a state of active interest or genuinely wanting to know more about something — allows you to embrace unfamiliar circumstances, giving you a greater opportunity to experience discovery and joy. We hope you value being curious too!

 Kindness is one of our top values. When we practice kindness either to other people or towards ourselves we can experience positive mental and physical changes through lowering stress levels and increasing the body's production of feel-good hormones such as dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin too. What's better than that?! 

 Empathy is the ability to perceive and relate to the thoughts, emotions, or experiences of others.  The ability to connect with others in an empathy way, to feel with them, to care about their well-being, and to act with compassion—is critical to our lives, helping us to get along, work more effectively, and thrive as a society. If you don't know how to be empathetic - we will teach you!

 A trauma-informed approach to care acknowledges that healthcare teams need to have a complete picture of a patient’s life situation — past and present — in order to provide effective health care services with a healing orientation. Trauma-informed care shifts the focus from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” to move towards healing.

Diversity and inclusion is about capturing the uniqueness of the individual; creating an environment that values and respects individuals for their culture, talents, skills and abilities to the benefit of the collective. Each person is unique, which means each story will be unique, and treatment will be unique. We use a client-centered approach to therapy to ensure that progress is being made.

Harm reduction refers to interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of health behaviors without necessarily extinguishing the problematic health behaviors completely. Why is this important to us? We want to break the stigma and shame behind topics such as addiction, alcohol, and substance abuse. We can't overcome these challenges if we aren't open and honest about it.

Anti-Oppressive practices recognize that oppression exists in our society, and we aim to 

mitigate the effects of oppression and eventually equalize the power imbalances that exist between people in society.  Advocacy is one key way that we attempt to do this - as we believe everyone has the right to affordable mental health services. 

  Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a problem-solving approach to the delivery of health care that integrates the best evidence from studies and patient care data with clinician expertise and patient preferences and values. When delivered in a context of caring and in a supportive environment, the highest quality of care and best patient outcomes can be achieved. We want you to flourish!