Lisa Woolgar

If you're suffering through a loss, or feeling emotionally overwhelmed or stuck, I'm a Registered Clinical Counsellor who specializes in helping people navigate even their most challenging emotions, felt experiences, and relationships. Every felt experience and relationship challenge, no matter how longstanding, uncomfortable or painful, is trying to express deep, valid and life-affirming needs. I offer individual sessions using a client-centred, wholistic and body (somatic) focused approach to help you turn your attention inward, feel into and name what you're experiencing, and identify your deepest needs and values at play, so that we can give you practical tools to overcome the obstacles keeping you from living into what you love, care about and need most in your life and relationships.

I offer individual, culturally informed counselling to those who are grieving traumatic/complicated/prolonged losses; struggling with anxiety, depression, and/or overwhelming emotions; working through relationship challenges; facing major life transitions and decisions; and are seeking deeper balance, connection, meaning and purpose in their lives.

I have a Masters in Counselling from OISE/University of Toronto (2005), advanced post-graduate training in Prolonged and Complicated Grief Counselling from the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition (2012-ongoing), as well as professional training in a number of methods that can help you connect with your deepest values, needs, and resources, including: somatic experiencing, inner family systems and family systems therapy, narrative therapy, expressive arts therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, eco-psychology, depth psychology, nonviolent communication, and Circle process.

I was a sessional instructor at the University of Guelph (2020-21), who developed and taught "Grief Therapy with Couples and Families;" was on the Board of Directors of the BC Bereavement Helpline (2021-2024); am a member of the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA), the Association for Death Education and Counselling (ADEC), the Climbing Grief Fund; and am active in community partnerships with organisations like the BC Hospice Palliative Care Association.

As someone who has experienced traumatic loss, as a survivor of breast cancer and inter-generational trauma, and as a mother, I bring to my work a deep understanding of the primary importance of nurturing self-care and healthy boundaries in our daily lives. I am also a musician and rock climber with a special interest in social justice and environmental issues. I am deeply committed to anti-oppression approaches to mental health and to supporting racialized and marginalised populations in creating systemic change.