Kaushiki Rao

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Hello and welcome, I am Kaushiki, a mental health therapist in Toronto.

What initially brought me to therapy was a personal crisis over a decade ago: therapy presented a path for undoing long-held patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It invited and emboldened me toward becoming my full self.

As your therapist, I want to invite you to be your own full self.

My work brings this invitation into being in a relational and embodied way. I meet you where you are in each moment and follow you where you go during our time together. Drawing from my professional experience and what comes up from being in session with you, we together discover what is happening unconsciously within you and between us. I encourage you to deepen your exploration and support you as you set in motion your agenda and vision for life.

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Apart from talking together, we might explore together through dramatic form and images. Sometimes I might invite you to embody and magnify a small part within yourself to deepen your access to that part. Instead of offering an interpretation, I aim to deepen or contain what is evoked for you. While I don’t use specific somatic modalities, I work in an embodied way and invite you to pay attention to your body’s sensations to help us explore how you are thinking and feeling. I use body-based techniques to teach grounding and centering, and paying attention to my own body informs me of where you might be.

My initial training in psychotherapy was as a person-centered integrative therapist at Parivarthan Counselling, Training & Research Centre in India. This is where I began my practice. In 2021 I immigrated to Canada and completed another training in psychotherapy at the Toronto Institute for Relational Psychotherapy (TIRP). This deepened my therapeutic lens. Previously, I completed a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology at Amherst College in the United States and proceeded on to complete a Masters of Arts in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago in the United States, graduating with distinction. The lens of these disciplines comes actively into my practice as I contemplate the social rootedness of our psyches.

I became a therapist because I began to see that structural inequality is held so deeply in our psyches and in our bodies. I expressly recognize that we live within structural contexts (gender, race, caste, capitalism to name a few) that come to trouble us from the inside. And I recognize that mental and emotional wellbeing are not disconnected from the impact of these contexts.

Over my many years of practice, I have done work with people struggling with a range of difficulties including anxiety, interpersonal troubles, depression, trauma, anger, shame, substance use, and I have particular experience with grief, suicide, self-harm and the dislocations of migration. Working collaboratively with psychiatrists, I have helped my clients make sense of psychiatric diagnoses that they may have received. Whether you seek help with a specific problem or are looking for a deeper exploration, I am skilled at working with my client towards the intentions you set. I look forward to witnessing your journey toward fullness.

Please feel free to book a no-cost 30 minute virtual video or phone consultation to see if we are a good fit to work together.

*Languages: English, Kannada, Tamil, (some) Hindi

Member: Ontario Society of Registered Psychotherapists

Membership No: 66665891

Supervisor: Ronnie Ali, RP

Supervisor license number: Ontario / CRPO 005116

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