How Denise Can Help You…

Trauma and EMDR

You may notice patterns that don’t quite make sense. Flashbacks that arrive uninvited. A pull to make yourself small. Difficulty being assertive or setting boundaries with the people closest to you. A sense of being triggered in your relationships without knowing why.

These are often signs of unresolved trauma — echoes of earlier experiences like neglect, abandonment, attachment ruptures, or a single event that changed how safe the world felt. Denise is trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), an evidence-based approach for trauma and PTSD that helps the nervous system process old experiences so they lose their grip on the present. Combined with inner child visualization and attention to what your body holds, it can reach the anxiety, shame, and self-protection that talk alone often cannot.

Relationship Losses & Grief

Divorce. The death of someone you loved. The end of a relationship you thought would last. These losses bring more than grief — they bring the disorienting work of imagining who you are without the people and roles that shaped your days.

Denise brings both professional skill and her own lived experience of loss to this work. Together you’ll make room for the grief without rushing it, while also exploring — when you’re ready — what re-entering life, and possibly new relationships, might look like for you.

Midlife Challenges and Change

Mid-life rarely arrives the way we expect. You may be caring for aging parents while still navigating complicated relationships with your adult children. Your body is shifting; perimenopause has its own way of rearranging your energy, your moods, your sleep. Retirement may be on the horizon, or already here, and underneath all of it is a quieter question: who am I now, and what do I actually want from the rest of my life?

Denise knows these questions from the inside. She helps clients move through these layered transitions with mindfulness and emotion-focused work, paying attention to where your physical, emotional, and spiritual selves have fallen out of alignment — and how to begin finding your way back to yourself.

Chronic Illness, Pain, and New Diagnoses

A new diagnosis. A chronic condition you’ve lived with for years. Whatever the diagnosis, the impact reaches far beyond the body — into your sense of self, your relationships, your daily rhythms, and the future you’d imagined for yourself.

Denise offers a supportive space to work through the fear, anger, grief, and identity shifts that so often come with illness — and to gently rebuild a sense of wholeness when your body has changed the rules.

About Denise

Denise came to counselling after a career in music management that took her across the country and around the world. Both paths grew out of the same instincts — a deep interest in people, a trust in lived experience as a teacher, and a refusal to stop learning. That same instinct shapes who she’s chosen to learn from: Dr. Bessel van der Kolk on trauma, Dr. Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry, and the Shambhala meditation tradition. It also shows up in her own ongoing self-work.

Now settled in Elora, Denise is a devoted parent to her young adult son, an avid nature lover, and an enthusiastic supporter of the arts in Wellington County.