Therapy begins with questions

People often come to therapy searching for answers to questions like:
Why do I feel this way?
What’s wrong with me?
How do I fix it?

These are understandable questions, especially in moments of loss, confusion, or uncertainty. Yet therapy rarely begins with answers. More often, it begins with the kinds of questions that widen our perspective rather than narrow it.

Cultivating Open Inquiry

Therapy is not a search for perfection but for understanding. It offers a deliberate slowing down and a turning toward what has been avoided or overlooked. When we begin to ask questions with openness rather than urgency, the nature of our struggles can shift.

We might begin to ask:

• What truly matters to me right now?

• What am I resisting, and what might that resistance be protecting?

• Who am I becoming through my choices?

• What kind of life could feel more coherent, or more my own?

These questions do not promise clarity all at once. They invite awareness, and awareness creates movement. The process is not about replacing pain with positivity but about meeting one’s life with honesty and curiosity, allowing values—not avoidance—to guide what comes next.

Collaborative Meaning-Making

Therapy is neither passive reflection nor advice-giving. It is a collaborative process of interpretation and meaning-making, marked by slow and steady change. Many clients arrive with patterns that have become invisible to them—habits of thought, emotion, and expectation that shape how they live. Together we begin to notice these patterns, to name what has been unnamed, and to discern what can be reimagined.

My role is to help trace these connections, to listen for coherence beneath the surface of experience, and to bring context to what may have felt isolated or senseless. The goal is not to fix what is broken but to understand what has been adaptive, and to consider what might now be ready for change.

Through a trusting therapeutic relationship, reflection, dialogue, and practice, this work leads toward greater psychological flexibility and a stronger sense of agency. That wise, grounded sense of Self allows us to act in ways consistent with our values, even when certainty is out of reach.

Therapy may begin in conversation, but it soon becomes a form of creative thought. When we ask deeper questions, we open the possibility of authentic inquiry into who we are and what we value most.

Ready to begin?

I offer therapy for couples, adults, and adolescents across Saskatchewan and Canada, with both in-person and remote sessions available. Whether you're carrying a problem that feels too heavy to name or finding it difficult to see where to turn, I’m here to help you explore what matters and what’s next.

Books to Explore

• Michael White & David Epston, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990). Norton & Company.

• Rollo May, The Discovery of Being (1983). W. W. Norton & Company.

• Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (2011). HarperWave.

• Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). Beacon Press.

• Stephen Joseph, Authentic: How to Be Yourself and Why It Matters (2016). Piatkus.