Trauma-Informed Care
Discover Pathways to Wellbeing
Virtual psychotherapy for individuals, families, adults, and teens. Serving Oakville, Hamilton, Burlington, Mississauga, Toronto, and communities across Ontario.
Michelle Dick
Psychological Associate
I am a Psychological Associate registered with the College of Psychologists of Ontario with a practice in Clinical and Counselling Psychology. My focus is providing trauma-informed and attachment-based support. I have a background in psychological and somatic approaches to psychotherapy, and value a wholistic perspective that considers body and mind. With over 25 years of experience providing psychological services, I have had the privilege of working in community mental health, hospital, school, and private practice settings.
What to Expect
- Therapy as a collaborative process
- You will have an opportunity to ask questions and get a sense of fit for working together
- At the beginning of our work together I will ask for some history
- It is usual for sharing of history to continue to unfold over time
- We will develop therapy goals together
A Note About Trauma-Informed Therapy
Trauma informed and focused therapy offers support to help renegotiate traumatic experience, shift trauma-based coping patterns, and restore a fuller range of experience and possibility.
Traumatic experiences come in many forms. Living through and coping with trauma involves instinctual survival reactions. Often over time, and outside of awareness, deep-rooted patterns of adaptation and coping form in an effort to function and meet the demands of daily life, despite ongoing distress and symptoms. While these patterns might be partly helpful, more so, they are limiting. For example, the full range of emotion, behaviour, choice, problem solving, and adapting that might otherwise be available is now narrowed in an instinctual effort to maintain a vigilant focus on surviving and functioning. Over time these coping patterns can negatively affect quality of life in many ways.
A Note About Somatic Therapy
Somatic approaches are body-centered in that they are guided by understandings of body and nervous system physiology. This involves an appreciation of the neurobiology of threat and of safety. In therapy it is possible to work with body and mind.
Somatically informed therapy works with the story that the body tells. The body’s story emerges in many ways (for example, felt-sense, image, emotion, movement) and it gives a view into patterns of coping, adaptation, and survival that develop instinctually. Survival patterns develop to keep us safe, but over time they can narrow experience and be limiting. An overall aim of therapeutic work is to support shifts into a wider range of healthy choice and flexibility within, with increased access to experiences of ease, presence, and connection. Working at a somatic level in psychotherapy holds space for curiosity, and takes into consideration the physical body and one’s felt sense within the body as one aspect of experience through which to offer support.
Somatic therapy and tools can be offered as a primary approach or in conjunction with other approaches based on client’s hopes, goals, and preferences for engaging in the therapy process.
Contact
Ask a question, request a call back, or schedule an appointment
Currenct availability is for virtual sessions across Ontario
(289) 799-4451
Book Now
Contact to schedule or book online
Mailing Address:
Chiropractic Wellness Group
80 Lakeshore Road West
Oakville ON, L6K 1E1
Urgent Concerns: Whole Life Psychology is not able to offer urgent or crisis care. If you are in crisis or in need of immediate help please go to the nearest emergency department or call 911.
Please be aware that communication over the internet (e.g., email and web forms) is not secure, and thus confidentiality cannot be guaranteed. Please do not send sensitive information via a contact form or via email.
Copyright 2025 Michelle Dick
