Trauma & Culturally-Informed Therapy in Burnaby, BC
Trauma and culturally-informed therapy at Harbour Counselling & Wellness supports BIPOC clients and immigrant families in Burnaby, BC — in-person or online — working with childhood trauma, intergenerational trauma, and the impact of racialization, migration, and systemic oppression. Sessions integrate relational, trauma-informed, and somatic approaches to help you understand your adaptations with compassion.
“Trauma is not a flaw or a weakness. It is a highly effective tool of safety and survival.” - Resmaa Menakem
None of us are shaped in isolation.
We are shaped by our families, our relationships, our communities, our cultures, the systems we live within, and the histories that came before us. These experiences influence how we understand ourselves, how we relate to others, what our bodies learn, and what feels possible in the world.
Sometimes these experiences expand our capacity to live, love, and belong.
Sometimes they ask us to adapt in ways that help us survive.
Trauma is not only an individual experience. It can be relational, intergenerational, institutional, and systemic. It can emerge through childhood experiences, relationships, loss, displacement, migration, racism, oppression, exclusion, and the many ways we learn what is or is not safe. Often, these experiences overlap.
Over time, these adaptations can become so familiar that we mistake them for who we are.
Sometimes the things we learned to do to survive become so automatic that they can feel like our personality. “This is just who I am” can feel like a fact, when sometimes it is a story shaped by what we have lived through.
Perhaps you find yourself always anticipating the needs of others, questioning your instincts, staying small to avoid conflict, feeling responsible for everyone around you, struggling to rest, or wondering why certain relationships or situations affect you so deeply.
These are not signs that something is wrong with you.
Often, they are signs of how wisely your body, heart, and mind learned to respond to the world around you.
How I approach trauma
“Healing and growth take place on a continuum.”
- Resmaa Menakem
My work begins with the understanding that your experiences make sense within the contexts in which they developed.
Together, we become curious about the patterns that have helped you survive while gently exploring whether they are still serving the life and relationships you want today.
Our work may include exploring the impact of childhood and attachment experiences alongside family roles, culture, identity, migration, belonging, racialization, systemic oppression, and the histories carried across generations. Rather than separating these experiences from the body, we recognize that they are lived, remembered, and often held within it.
I integrate relational, trauma-informed, and somatic approaches that invite both conversation and embodied awareness. We move at a pace that feels supportive, creating space to notice what has been carried, build capacity for what feels difficult, and reconnect with the parts of yourself that may have been shaped by survival.
Healing is not about forgetting where you came from or becoming someone different.
It is about understanding your adaptations with compassion, reclaiming choice where survival once made the decisions for you, and creating new possibilities for how you want to live, relate, and belong.
You do not have to know whether what happened to you was "significant enough."
If your experiences have shaped the way you relate to yourself, your body, your relationships, or the world around you, they are worthy of care.
Together, we will honour what helped you survive while creating space for the life, relationships, and possibilities that are still unfolding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Still have questions? Take a look at the FAQ or reach out anytime.
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This therapy is for folks who have been shaped by experiences of loss, disconnection, harm, or not feeling safe or supported. That could be in relationships, families, communities or larger systems like racism, sexism or ableism, to name a few. Exploring therapy and being able to name the harm you experienced, be believed, be supported, and met with non-judgment can help tremendously in working towards healing.
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Disconnection from your body, emotions, or needs
Shame, self-blame, and difficulty trusting yourself
Relationship and attachment patterns
Boundaries, people-pleasing, and over-functioning
Experiences of violence, neglect, loss, or relational rupture
Intergenerational and ancestral patterns of trauma
Experiences of racism, colonialism, migration, displacement, or marginalization
Reconnecting with agency, safety, pleasure, and aliveness
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It means we make space for noticing, exploring and naming the ways your experiences have impacted you from a place of curiosity. There is room for all of your emotions to show up - fully. The rage, grief, disappointment, and sadness have some breathing room. We are looking at the context of your life rather than seeing your responses, ways of showing or strategies you use to cope as bad and wrong.
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If it feels important to you, we sure do! Trauma is personal, relational, intergenerational, and collective. Experiences of racism, colonialism, displacement, oppression, and many other forms of harm impact individuals, families, and communities across generations.
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The body holds and communicates experiences that might be difficult to access by talking about them. When we bring awareness to these embodied experiences, this cultivates a way of building more choice, connection, agency and capacity in the present moment. The brain holds what we know, and the body holds what we have experienced. In this way, the body is a valuable and important resource in this work.
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You may notice more choice and capacity in how you respond while remaining connected to yourself, your values, your relationships and your truth. You might have greater access to connection, rest, pleasure and hopefulness. This is not necessarily because you are unaffected or have fully healed from the past, but you can know envision a way forward without being bound to the past.