Through her experience over the years as a counsellor, Michelle has great faith in each person’s ability to find and develop a self-healing, positive and empowering path. She sees her role in the counselling process as a collaborative one: helping clients to discover and release that which is causing them to feel stuck in certain aspects of their lives.

Michelle supports clients to build insight into personal history, family dynamics and cultural influences that may be helping or hindering their ability to live fully and to find joy in every day life. Her goal is to enable clients to truly realize their own potential.

Michelle is certified in EMDR. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a non-drug, non-hypnosis technique used to treat symptoms such as post-traumatic reactions, anxiety, guilt and depression. With EMDR, the counsellor guides the client to help neutralize the debilitating impact of traumatic experiences. The painful memories and/or unpleasant emotions or body sensations are released so that these experiences no longer intrude on one’s daily life.

She also uses Lifespan Integration, a new, gentle method designed to help teens and adults who were traumatized or neglected when they were young children. LI works at a deep level to change "patterned responses and outmoded defensive strategies," helping to "re-set" the mind’s reactions so they are more in line with a mature, present-day life scenario rather than those of a young child - where the mind may have previously been locked. LI discovers old memories that are connected to the current problem and builds a time line of "moving pictures" from the past to the present, helping to create a more unified, integrated, centered self.