Vanessa Chen

Hi, I'm Vanessa! I specialize in supporting children (3+), teens, adults, and couples.

Every individual is unique; I combine different approaches that best fit your needs. My approach aims to create a warm, non-judgement environment to build a strong therapeutic relationship, and work together as a team to achieve your goals.

If you’re looking for an easy-going, compassionate and collaborative therapist, I’d love to connect!

In some cases, “the only way out is through” (Robert Frost).

Talking about our feelings, exploring our inner thoughts, and analyzing our behaviour isn’t a comfortable process for everyone. My role is to guide you through therapy in a way that feels safe, manageable, and progressive.

If new to you, I will introduce and work within the framework of the “window of tolerance”. Our window of tolerance is the “safe zone” where you can effectively manage and cope with stress and emotions. Stress and trauma can cause our window of tolerance to shrink, and when that happens, a small amount of stress can either cause us to be hyperaroused (angry, overwhelmed) or hypoaroused (numb, shut down). Together we will expand your window of tolerance so you can stay in the safe zone (stay regulated) while experiencing and processing through negative emotions and events.

I believe that every individual is unique, therefore I use an integrated approach, pulling on a number of therapeutic techniques, when working with individuals.

For example, if experiencing feelings of depression (ie. sad, irritable, helpless) or anxiety (ie. fear, dread, uneasiness), I often take a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approach combined with mindfulness and Solution-Focused Therapy. Mindfulness techniques help to decrease the intensity of your thoughts and feelings for us to move into CBT, a more goal-oriented form of therapy. Through CBT we work to identify and change the thinking patterns leading you to experience difficult emotions or have strong undesired behavioural reactions. From a place of compassionate understanding of yourself, we move into Solution-Focused Therapy, setting goals and developing the skills needed for you to feel in greater control of the situations that presently challenge you.

Parent/Parents
In my work supporting a parent(s) to develop the relational and communication skills needed to better help a child with challenging behaviours, I frequently use solution-focused therapy. This approach is future-focused; we won’t dwell on the problem, but rather proactively come up with solutions that could be applied to alleviate your situation. I will also use parent-directed interactions, which is a behaviour management approach to help decrease unwanted and increased wanted behaviours.

Parent and Child
It’s been scientifically proven that positive parent and child relationships are very beneficial for a child's physical, mental and emotional well-being. I use the framework Synergetic Play Therapy and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy to help facilitate parent and child sessions. We will work on attunement between the parent and child using good communication skills, and their nervous system regulation. In these sessions, I model to the parent appropriate ways to respond to the child, allow the child to lead the play, help regulate the child, and how to increase positive parenting practices.

I use Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) when working with couples. The main focus of EFT is to improve attachment and bonding. Secure attachment has shown to help regulate difficult emotions, be aware and understanding of other perspectives, ability to be attuned with one’s partner, empathetic and compassionate.
There are three main stages to EFT:

Stabilization

This involves de-escalating the negative cycle that has overtaken the relationship. Once the negative cycle is recognized, we can work on overcoming it together. During this stage, I may encourage partners to engage with softer emotions to lead to a more positive emotion regulation and engagement style.

Restructuring attachment

Stage 2 is about being aware of partners’ attachment fears, and shaping accessible, responsive and engaged interactions. The aim is for partners to ask for their needs to be met in a soft manner.

Consolidation

The goal for stage 3 includes stabilization, reinforcement and to celebrate the changes within and between partners. We will continue to work on and practice effective cooperation/ communication so previous problems can be solved easily and to prevent previous interaction patterns.

Everyone's journey is different - there is no magic number of sessions.

The goal of a first session is for you to leave with more information and insight than you came. We often explore things like: your emotional experience, your thought process, your behavioural reactions, and where you may have learned these from. We will collaboratively establish your goal(s) for therapy: where we are starting and where you want to get to.

The path to getting there is not linear. It uncover’s itself as we go down it, like peeling an onion where as each layer is removed you come to see the situation and yourself more and more clearly. We then build up the skills needed to navigate your situation successfully.

Feeling a sense of progress is important. To measure your results and changes, we will reflect back to the first session:

• What were your thoughts, worries, and feelings?
• Where are you now?
• What work do we need to focus on next?
• When do things feel complete for you?