Jay Hails
My strength lies in helping you identify and celebrate your own unique strengths. The fact that you're looking here for help already tells me you're strong. If you’re overwhelmed or stuck, or you’ve lost something…
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About Jay
My strength lies in helping you identify and celebrate your own unique strengths. The fact that you're looking here for help already tells me you're strong.
If you’re overwhelmed or stuck, or you’ve lost something precious, I can help. If your feelings are too intense, or you don’t even know what you’re feeling anymore, I can walk you through that fog. I offer my clients empathy, respect, curiosity, appreciation, and honesty.
I also offer my clients agency and control. I'm a professional and I'm providing the therapy, but you're the expert on you. It's your therapy, and you're the one in charge.
I also work with kids—on feelings, behaviour, and learning. I'm great at making connections, assessing strengths, solving problems, and celebrating breakthroughs with children and their caregivers. I spent years working as a special education teacher and school counsellor. Schools are complex systems, but I know how to help children and families navigate them.
I'm a Masters level Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC) with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA), and I've worked with people of all ages and diverse backgrounds, in school, corporate, and private practice settings.
I have expertise in helping people with these concerns:
- anxiety, worries, & managing stress
- celebrating 2SLGBTQ+ identities
- suicide prevention
- trauma response & recovery
- life changes
- setting boundaries
- relationship breakdown
- processing guilt
- loss of a pet
- infidelity
- grief & loss
Here are some of the child and youth issues where I've had success:
- childhood anxiety
- friendship skills
- self-esteem
- child cognitive development
- school refusal
- adolescent emotional needs
- challenging behaviours
- self-harm
- parenting problems
- school situations
- family conflict
- worries
- making friends
- coping with separation or divorce
- selective mutism
- questioning gender identities, roles, and orientations
I'll try to avoid jargon here, and I won't use any pretentious acronyms. But some people want to know things like this. My work is informed by a few different models, including these:
- Gordon Neufeld's attachment-based, developmental approach
- Carl Rogers' client-centred therapy
- Gabor Maté's work on trauma
- positive psychology
- cognitive behaviour therapy
- harm reduction
- trauma-informed work
- narrative therapy
- culturally responsive counselling
Free consultation:
- I'm happy to spend a few minutes talking "off the clock" so you can decide if I'm a good fit. It's generally agreed that the therapeutic relationship is the number one predictor of therapy's success.
- We can talk in person, in my cozy fourth-floor office on West Broadway; or virtually—on Google Meet, FaceTime, telephone—from any place you feel comfortable. I've had clients who prefer phone sessions while they're out walking, and clients who like a video call from the comfort of a vehicle.
Some things I know are true:
- Emotions aren't problems, they're valuable information. They tell us what's going on with ourselves. We need to pay attention, feel them, and express them.
- When you're making a change, baby steps are your best bet. Set a goal that's easy to reach, and use that easy win to set the next goal.
- Direction, not perfection. Mistakes are better than paralysis.
- I can't expect to get trust from someone until I give trust to them first.
- Also, chances are I won't get respect from someone until I give respect to them first.
- "The truth about stories is that that's all we are." (Thomas King)
- Sometimes all a story wants is to be told. It helps if someone is really listening.
- There's no lesson more valuable than learning to trust yourself.
- When we're asking a question, we often already know the answer.
- When we're struggling with a difficult decision, we often already know what we've decided; we're just not ready to admit it yet.
- With therapy, one size does not fit all. You're not like anybody else, so your therapy won't look like anybody else's. We'll design it together to fit the person you are and the goals you have.
Fun facts:
- I have a background in music; I recorded and toured with a band for a few years. The music was scrappy prairie folk punk with a little twang and poetic lyrics.
- I've done very rewarding work as a behavioural consultant for First Nations schools in Saskatchewan. I survived those rez roads in February in a Honda Civic.
- I have decades of experience working in schools as a special education teacher. I know how to help children navigate these complex systems to succeed.
- I was a school counsellor in low-income neighbourhoods for years. I learned more from my young clients than they learned from me.
- I get counselling at difficult times in my own life, so I get to see the therapeutic alliance from both sides.
- When you talk to me and I seem absorbed by your story, that's because I'm genuinely curious about what you're going through.
- I gave up social media as an experiment years ago, and never went back to it. I've been much happier ever since.
- I walk to work because the rhythm of walking is therapeutic.
- I enjoy a great cup of coffee. But I can't really tell a great cup of coffee from a mediocre one. What notes of caramel and charred citrus?
- I ride my bike all over Vancouver. It looks light blue but, it's blue sage.
I was born to settlers in Saskatchewan, in the beautiful Treaty 6 territory and the homeland of the Metis—mîywâsin. I'm so grateful now to live, love, and work on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
He/ him.