It’s a long story, how I got from there to here, and an evolving story, where here is.  

It starts with my questions many years ago about why the world worked as it did, why people made the choices that they did, and why things were as messed up as they were.   As is true for all kids, I think, in different ways, there was so much about the world that didn’t make sense to me.   

I started getting involved in politics in university, feminist politics, queer politics, trying to make improvements in how the university functioned.  All of this was a lot more work with a lot less success than I had thought, and I couldn’t understand why.   

So I went to law school to fight the good fight.   And I hated law school.  I took a leave of absence after my first year, and decided there had to be something that could make more of a difference, faster.  

When I realized that what I needed was to understand more about the world and the people who made up that world, I decided that it made sense to study psychology, which I understood to be the study of people.   Now I would say that psychology is the study of individuals.   And that it’s a lot less hard to understand individuals than large groups of individuals, and that that big difference is a part of what I was struggling to understand.  We are all social animals, and I believe that so much of who we are and why we struggle is rooted in that.  But also that’s where a lot of our joy lives, in connection with (the right) others.  

I earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology, which didn’t answer as many of my questions as I had expected, but I learned a lot.   

Towards the end of my degree, I started applying for work as a counsellor in a mental health community agency.   Those were the clients I wanted to work with, with the context of a small agency of folks who shared my values.   I wanted to run groups, not just work with individuals.  I did not get any of the jobs I applied for, and in most cases, I didn’t even get an interview.   I later learned that I had gotten the wrong degree for these kinds of jobs.

Instead, I decided that I would start a private practice as a psychotherapist.    I worked with the Women’s Counselling, Referral, and Education Centre who connected people who were looking for therapy and the therapists they thought could help them.   

The private practice went well.  I loved the work, the clients mostly got significantly better, many clients referred people they cared about to me, and I was making a good enough living for me.   I was learning and growing and doing better work over time, and I figured that I’d keep doing this as long as all of those things remained true.

That all remained true for 29 years.   

Now, I am no longer a practicing psychotherapist.  I resigned from the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario on March 2, 2026.   There is much more about this on the "My Resignation" page.

So instead of being a psychotherapist, I am trying to figure out how to best help people from where I am now, using everything I have learned along the way.