Megan is a Registered Provisional Psychologist. Megan brings an open mind to her therapy practice, along with training in the most recent approaches to mental health care. While versed in how to help people resolve symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, and emotional dysregulation, Megan competed additional study and training in working with LGBTQ2S+ populations, individuals struggling with body image, and people with Indigenous background.
Beyond standard coursework and training, Megan engaged in a variety of specialized training and volunteer work in supporting sexual/physical and emotional assault victims during her academic career. Megan’s has helped older teens, university aged assault victims, and established adults deal with acute distress and trauma. Her client base includes individuals who were recent or historical victims of assault, accident, or injury.
Megan is currently taking additional training and undergoing advanced supervision to further build her skills in working with children and teens. She has completed foundational work in Play Therapy on her way to full Certification as a Play therapist. Megan’s work with children focuses on providing children a space to express themselves in ways that helps to release personal distress, and to build positive communication and emotional expression skills. Megan has a particular interest in working with children who have experienced trauma, abuse or neglect.
She has provided trauma clients with crisis counselling in the field and in hospital settings. She also works with individuals longer term as they work through the experience and the aftermath. This may include helping clients deal with decisions around disclosure, changing relationships with family and/or friends, and potentially navigating police, legal and court proceedings.
Megan’s goal in working with clients struggling with trauma is to aid the client in reducing trauma symptoms such as sleep disruption, flashbacks, avoidance behaviors, irritability and anger outbursts, and negative self-thinking. Professional experience mixed with evidence-based research has provided Megan with a strong base understanding of supporting individuals who has experienced sexual violence.
Unfortunately, substance abuse is a common outcome of trauma or stress. Sometimes children and teens learn from their parents that a solution to distress is to drink, take drugs, gamble, loose oneself in the internet, or engage in some other pastime that can take over their life. For others, the addiction comes as a way of treating emotional distress. Substances, distracting oneself with video games, shopping, over-exercising or other activities, helps to “forget" for a few minutes past events, or current problems. Over time though the distraction, the means to pain relief takes over, and starts to create its own problems.
Megan knows that often the best way to treat addiction is to treat the underlying cause of the addictive behaviour. This might mean working through childhood events, recent loss, or current stressors. She finds that as people feel better about themselves and have less negative self-blame the addition often reduces. For many people, as feel they feel more and more positive about themself, the draw of substance abuse, risky behaviour, or simply trying to forget gets less and less, and they are able control or even be free of the addictive behaviour.
Long considered two sides of the same coin, depression and anxiety are the most common concerns of individuals seeking therapy. Treatment for Depression and Anxiety may include Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), Mindfulness, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and various meditative techniques. Megan has helped depressed clients who have struggled with low-mood, low-energy, lack of motivation, and loss of interest in previously enjoyable activities regain their connection to life. She has helped anxious clients who are struggling to control random thinking, restless and feeling keyed up, difficulty concentrating or blanking out, and general worry that disrupts their ability to manage some or many daily living tasks. Utilizing a combination of researched based therapeutic approaches, personalized support, and recognition of each gain the client makes has been key elements of Megan’s therapeutic success. Megan’s goal is that clients leave therapy with the skills to proactively handle any future mood challenges they may have.
Megan has long had an interest in helping individuals who are struggling with various body and food issues. This may be individuals who struggle with eating too much, too little, individuals who do not like their food choices, or individuals who struggle with food due to health issues (i.e. diabetes, physiological/enzymatic conditions, food trauma/feeding tube).
While the relationship with food may play a role in body image, body image struggles may be entirely separate from eating habits. Megan can offer a variety of strategies for helping her clients overcome body image concerns. She has worked with clients who are uncomfortable with how they see themself. This can include clients who see themselves as over or under weight, lacking or having too much of certain physical attributes, and who are considering surgery or other interventions to change the way they look.
Megan has helped clients whose self-image has been affected by the words or actions of others, either historically or in current times. This could include have a parent to who was overly concerned about the client’s weight when they were a child – leaving the now adult client anxious about food or body image, or it could be a client who was bullied as a child, teen or adult about their physical appearance or weight. Megan has also helped clients who have struggled with body image due to cultural, social, or family imposed expectations.
Megan’s interest in supporting the LGBTQ2S+ community comes from her own background, and experiences in school and with friends. To better help this population she has actively perused coursework and practical training to become better versed in working with common LGBTQ@s+ issues of isolation, rejection, lateral violence (aggression/disparagement/shunning between members of the community), family of original challenges, feeling insecure/unsafe in the general community, and self-actualization.
While recognizing that individuals within the LGBTQ2S+ community struggle with all of the mental heal challenges faced by the general population, such issues may also come with particular twists that can be easily misunderstood by a non-LGBTQ2S+ trained therapist. Megan works hard to stay current with the challenges within this community, and also to focus on the particular individual needs of the client she is working with.
Canada’s First Nation populations and Metis have faced a wide range of cultural and social challenges to identity, community acceptance and community value. Stigma and stereotyping by government agencies, social planners, and everyday citizens create acute and chronic distress. The disruptive and harmful actions by other social groups both historically and on an ongoing basis towards indigenous peoples, continues to impact individuals in the First Nations/Metis community in real time. Megan has familiarized herself with many of the systemic issues faced by First Nations and Metis communities. Such systematic issues may include land/resource loss, residential/day schools, cultural/language loss, and casual stereotyping.
She has seen how such events trickle down to negatively impact individual members of Ingenious heritage in many areas. She knows that visibly Indigenous are subject to far more verbal abuse, biased judgement, and outright indifference. She also knows that major disruptive historical events such as Residential and Day Schools continue to impact Residential and Day School survivors, and their descendants in terms of parenting ability, compromised relationship skills, increased risk of addictions, and reduced sense of self-value. Megan offers a place for clients to heal who are struggling directly or indirectly with the effects of intolerance, disrupted family interactions, and negative assumptions.
Self-esteem is the value someone places on themselves. Individuals with low self-esteem tend to devalue their own abilities, nature, and hope for personal development. Having low self-esteem can show in difficulties with standing-up for oneself, suppressing one’s own interests and goals to “keep the peace”, “so people will like me”/“put up with me”/ “not abandon me”, or to avoid conflict. Fear of conflict may play a huge role in compromised boundaries and sense of personal worth. Individuals with low self-esteem may struggle to identify personal strengths, feel hopeless and helpless in the face of other’s needs and expectations, and may often feel overwhelmed.
Megan has direct experience creating counselling techniques that support individuals with self-esteem related issues. Challenging negative internalized stories can begin to shift an individual's understanding of themselves. Megan creates an environment which explores how subjective experiences shaped clients and their relationships.
Megan has been working in the mental health field since 2014.
Megan is completing the final steps in her Master’s of Counselling Degree from Athabasca University. She expects to graduate in April of 2023. She obtained her Bachelors of Arts in Psychology from the University of Lethbridge in 2019.
Her professional background includes working as a sexual violence intervention worker at a women’s shelter. She learned direct skills in crisis counselling and supporting individuals with trauma. Megan also has experience working with at-risk youth. Megan both worked and volunteered with teenagers starting at age 13. Megan volunteered at the Counselling and Career Center at the University of Lethbridge as an undergraduate student. There she provided students and faculty with mental health support. Megan has also worked as a primary care disability aide.
