About Shelby

I am a Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO #12083), hold a Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology from Yorkville University, and am a Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent several years as a law clerk at a family law practice. I watched people navigate one of the most disorienting experiences of their lives inside a system that is, by design, adversarial. What I saw, consistently, was that people needed more than a lawyer could offer. That observation is a large part of why I became a therapist. I also have training in conflict resolution and alternative dispute resolution, which informs how I think about high-conflict dynamics and communication breakdown.

My undergraduate training in political science also shapes how I work. It gave me a habit of taking context seriously, seeing more than one side of a situation, and sitting with complexity rather than rushing to tidy conclusions. That is directly useful in divorce and family-of-origin work, where the real story is usually more complicated than what any one person involved is telling themselves.

That background shapes my work, but it is only part of the picture. Many of the people I work with are not in a courtroom and never will be. They are navigating estrangement from a parent, tension with a partner that has quietly gone on too long, a pattern of difficult relationships they cannot quite name, or the weight of stress and anxiety that has become so familiar it feels normal. What these experiences often share is that something in the past is driving something in the present, and it takes time and the right kind of attention to see it clearly.

I work with adults dealing with relationship breakdown, divorce and separation, betrayal trauma, family-of-origin wounds, chronic stress, anxiety, and the kinds of relational patterns that keep showing up no matter how much a person tries to change them.

My approach is trauma-informed and integrative, drawing from ACT, DBT, somatic work, Gestalt, narrative therapy, and psychodynamic approaches. We work at your pace on both immediate challenges and underlying patterns: why boundaries feel impossible, where people-pleasing comes from, how past relationships shape current ones.

I am not here to tell you what to do or move you through predetermined stages. You know your life better than anyone. My role is to help you see patterns more clearly, offer practical tools that actually work, and create space for you to figure out what you want, separate from what everyone else thinks you should want.

If any of this sounds familiar, and you want straightforward help without therapy clichés, let's talk.