Accepting new clients in person in Collingwood and online across Ontario
My Approach
Nervous System First
We work with your body's patterns, like fawn response and hypervigilance (if you don't know what these terms mean I'll explain it all), the ways you've learned to keep yourself safe.
Parts Work
Through Internal Family Systems, we'll explore the different parts that make you, you. I'll help you meet and understand these parts to allow for more inner harmony.
Women's Physiology
Female nervous systems, hormones, and stress responses are unique. I understand how your cycle affects your capacity, how pregnancy/postpartum amplifies patterns.
Breaking Patterns
This isn't just symptom management, my focus is helping you interrupt generational conditioning. I'll help you identify what's no longer serving you and what you want to re-learn what you model for the next generation and what you're willing to tolerate in your own life.
Compassion Over Criticism
Healing happens through curiosity instead of judgment. Sometimes that can be hard to do, I help you reduce the shame and loneliness that shows up when you're struggling, meeting yourself exactly where you are without making yourself wrong or bad.
Being Truly Seen
I'm committed to offering a genuine, trauma-informed, judgment-free space dedicated to your healing and self-inquiry. I want you to feel seen, heard, and accepted and have a healing experience of having space held for you to explore your inner world.
What We'll Work On
The specific focus depends on what you're struggling with, but clients often come to work on:
Nervous System & Patterns: Mapping out and understanding your unique nervous system patterns and stress responses, building capacity
Internal Work: Integrating wounded parts, developing self-compassion, uncovering limiting beliefs, connecting with suppressed emotions
Relational Skills: Setting boundaries without guilt, asking for what you need, creating reciprocal relationships, tolerating conflict
Life Transitions: Anxiety and depression, highly sensitive nervous systems, perfectionism, fertility/pregnancy/postpartum, birth trauma, entering motherhood
The Goal: Helping you return to yourself - understanding your patterns, honoring your needs, and trusting your own judgment again.
The Strategies That Kept You Safe Are Now Keeping You Stuck
You learned early that being agreeable, accommodating, and low-maintenance kept the peace with others. You became the easy one. The flexible one. The one who never complains.
You say yes when you mean no. You smile through discomfort. You manage everyone else's emotions while ignoring your own. You apologize for taking up space.
These patterns worked, they got you through childhood, helped you avoid conflict, and kept relationships smooth, especially with the challenging people in your life.
Now you're exhausted, resentful, and feel disconnected from yourself. You're doing everything, but it never feels like enough. You doubt yourself and struggle to trust your own judgment because you've spent so long deferring to others.
The NICE GIRL patterns that once protected you are now the very thing holding you back.
Clinical Expertise Meets Embodied Experience
I'm Aleta - I've personally felt the impact of healing the NICE GIRL pattern - and I'm passionate about helping other women step into their own version of Self-Assured Woman.
Being sensitive, empathetic, emotionally observant, caring, and generous are all traits I've come to love about myself once I learned how to harness them in a way that didn't leave me feeling resentful, overstimulated, anxious, and exhausted.
If you're someone who wants to still be kind and caring and generous but do so in a way that doesn't leave you empty, you've come to the right place!
I'm a Registered Social Worker (RSW) working in private practice, specializing in trauma-informed therapy, Internal Family Systems, and integrating women's physiology.
My love for supporting women in the perinatal stages of life as a birth doula is what inspired me to became a therapist, specializing in perinatal mental health. I understand how women's bodies hold wisdom that cultural conditioning teaches us to override - whether that's during birth, in relationships, or in daily life.
A few additional credentials:
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RSW, Bachelor of Social Work
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Internal Family Systems (IFS) Training
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Advanced Perinatal Mental Health Training
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Somatic Experiencing® Training (in progress)
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Birth Doula (DONA trained)
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Childbirth Educator