Work With Us

Yay, You Made It! Come On In!

You’ve come this far, why don’t we talk about what it would mean to work with us. There are some beliefs we have at Dochas that might be helpful to know about if you’re considering all of this:

All therapists practice differently. What you experienced before isn’t necessarily what you’ll experience now.

You are the expert of you. We have insights to offer but this is about your journey, not ours. If anything mentioned doesn’t fit, feel free to disagree.

We are travellers with you. We walk alongside you as you move through things. We’ll ask questions, we’ll encourage you, and we’ll call you on things that aren’t healthy. BUT you are the one doing the work. You are finding the answers and strengths that were always within. It’s our job to help bring those to surface without answering it for you! It’s NOT our job to give advice – although admittedly that’s sometimes hard. We are human after all. Seriously though, if you’re looking to come for someone to tell you what to do, we’re not your people.

We believe in bringing mind, body, and emotion more together in harmony.

All people have strengths, including you! We’ll use them to get you where you want to be.

Finally, we believe it’s our duty to create a safe, warm, accepting space where you can be who you need to be without judgment.

Now, why was that important? Well, because if you’re looking for someone to give advice or be super directive, then you would like the name of a different therapist. We like to use a bunch of different approaches to find what fits you!

What Does Therapy Look Like?

On this site, you’ll see some of those additional approaches outlined, like EMDR or Hypnosis. In general, though, we use traditional talk therapy. No, you’re not laying on a couch with someone sitting behind you, analyzing your every word. Creepy. What this does mean is you come to the office and we sit and talk.

Huh? How is that supposed to help? You could probably do that with any number of friends or family. Remember what was mentioned above? The whole non-judgment, no advice thing? That’s one way it’s different.

It’s also different because we have specialized training in how to ask questions and dig deeper, no matter how painful and scary it may seem. We will take steps to move into those spaces safely, promise! When we’re talking, things will come up that we might need to address specifically. In talk therapy, some of the strategies we’ll use are:

Mindfulness. Yep, a phrase that’s thrown around a lot these days. What this might look like in a session is asking you to focus on the here and now, suspending judgment of yourself, and noticing what comes from that.

Connecting with your emotions. We’d do this by looking at how your body feels, what thoughts you’re having, and noticing how they all interact to affect how you feel. Also, we’ll work on labelling them and telling the difference between some of them that can feel similar, like fear and excitement.

Another emotional connection strategy can be empty-chair or two-chair, where you have the opportunity to talk with someone you feel something about without them being there. As part of this, you learn to focus on the feeling and being able to talk about it, instead of the surface stuff we all get stuck on. Like when someone cuts his beard or shaves her legs right after someone cleaned the sink. Instead of talking with the person about the mess, we talk about how disrespectful it feels. (Breathe. Breathe!).

We use strategies targeting what’s bugging you, like, if your stomach is flipping over because of anxiety, you need a body strategy, like sipping water. If your thoughts are racing, we use a cognitive strategy like imagery, self-talk, or seeking proof.

In addition to all of that, we’ll listen and reflect what we’re hearing, checking for clarification and understanding.

Important Note: The most effective and important strategy is: us building a healthy, trusting, safe, non-judgmental relationship together. All these strategies are great, but the research has shown the only thing that consistently has the best effects is the therapeutic relationship. This means it HAS to be a place you can come where you feel safe, able to trust, and be vulnerable. Openness and honesty on both our parts is essential. And we’re pretty sure we can do that together.