I've spent the past thirty years in community mental health providing psychotherapy services to children, youth, and families experiencing a wide range of concerns. What remains clear and heartening is that people carry ideas about how they want life to be, hopes for things to be different, and dreams of what might yet become possible, even in the face of long-standing distress. They possess strengths that may not yet be named, but which have helped them persevere.

My responsibility is to create the kind of space where your own wisdom, skills for living, and hopes for the future can come to the foreground and become useful.

My theoretical and practice influences are Solution-Focused Brief Therapy and Narrative Therapy. My specialty is Single Session Therapy—getting the most from the moment at hand. These approaches are held together by a number of important orienting principles, represented beautifully in David Denborough's Storytelling Rights:

Modelled after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these are the kinds of understandings I use to guide my therapy practice.

• Article 1. Everyone has the right to define their experiences and problems in their own words and terms.

• Article 2. Everyone has the right to have their life understood in the context of what they have been through and in the context of their relationships with others.

• Article 3. Everyone has the right to invite others who are important to them to be involved in the process of reclaiming their life from the effects of hardship.

• Article 4. Everyone has the right not to have problems caused by trauma and injustice located inside them, internally, as if there were some deficit in them. The person is not the problem; the problem is the problem.

• Article 5. Everyone has the right to have their responses to hard times acknowledged. No one is a passive recipient of hardship. People always respond. People always protest injustice.

• Article 6. Everyone has the right to have their skills and knowledge of survival respected, honoured, and acknowledged.

• Article 7. Everyone has the right to know and experience that what they have learned through hard times can make a contribution to the lives of others in similar situations.

From Retelling the Stories of Our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience — David Denborough

I hope you’ll consider meeting with me and together we can enter into exploration and discovery of what might be possible.