Working with Body, Mind, Emotion, and Meaning
to help cultivate movement toward a natural sense of belonging, connection, and wholeness
Michelle Dick
Psychological Associate
Welcome to my website! I am a Psychological Associate registered with the College of Psychologists of Ontario with a practice in Clinical and Counselling Psychology. I have a background in psychological and somatic approaches to psychotherapy, and value a holistic perspective that supports body and mind. With over 25 years of experience providing psychological services, I have had the pleasure 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 and Healing
Trauma informed and focused therapy can help renegotiate traumatic experience, shift trauma-based coping patterns, and restore a fuller range of experience and possibility across psychological and physiological functioning.
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. These coping patterns involve psychological and physiological systems, and over time can negatively affect quality of life and health in many ways.
A Note About Somatically Informed Therapy
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 within our autonomic nervous system and neurobiology. Survival physiology develops to keep us safe, but over time it narrows experience and is limiting. Working at a somatic level in psychotherapy is intentional about finding and supporting the conditions that will invite and allow the nervous system and neurobiology to shift out of survival physiology and into the more open, present, easeful, and engaged states of the physiology of safety.
“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic other.”
– Peter Levine
Contact
Ask a question, request a call back, or schedule an appointment
I offer virtual sessions across Ontario, with some availability for in-person sessions
(289) 799-4451
In-Person Sessions at:
2421 Bristol Circle, Unit C 100
Oakville ON, L6H 5S9
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 2024 Michelle Dick