About Colette

Hi, I am Colette. I am part of Leanne's care team, and I work with teens 16 years and older, adults, and couples in-person in Kitchener and virtually across Ontario.

The people I work with are often the ones everyone else leans on. The reliable one. The one who remembers every birthday, takes on the extra work, and says “I am fine” before anyone can finish asking. Many learned long ago that their own needs could wait. Some are quietly questioning the values they built their lives around. Others want to make sense of what they have been through, and find a way to live that finally feels like their own, once they figure out what that means.

Together, we explore your ways of knowing and being in the world. I work from an attachment-based, humanistic perspective, which means I am interested in all of you, not only the problem that brought you in. I will offer gentle challenges and honest observations about the patterns that keep looping, with friends, with family, or with your partner. I value complexity over quick fixes. And I show up first as a human being, never as the expert on your life.

I know this work from the other side of the room.

For decades, I carried the weight of an acute childhood trauma. It lived in my nervous system as near-constant anxiety, a hypervigilance I could not switch off, and a racing mind that rarely stopped. I was the classic people-pleaser at work and at home, and I measured my worth by how useful and accomplished I could be.

On paper, I had built the life I was supposed to want. A steady teaching career. A lovely home. A solid marriage and two beautiful children. All that was missing was the white picket fence. Inside, I was edging toward burnout, longing for something truer than the life I was performing.

Then a major concussion brought everything to a halt. I could not work, parent, or hold a conversation. Depression settled in, my anxiety reached an all-time high, and the trauma I had buried for most of my life grew louder every day. I knew I needed help, and I knew I could not wait any longer.

I remember the mix of fear and hope I felt walking into that first session. My therapist stayed steady through the hardest parts of my story, and she never once asked me to make myself smaller. Vulnerability felt wildly uncomfortable at first. Slowly, I learned that leaning into that discomfort was exactly where the growth was.

With her, I found a sense of worth that had nothing to do with performance. Piece by piece, I rebuilt a life that finally felt like the real me.

Now I get to offer that same steadiness to you.

You do not need the right words, or a tidy version of your story. Bring the parts that feel messy, uncertain, or too much. Those are the parts we will make room for.