Graham Hall

My interest in therapy has always been two-fold 一 professional ambition and engagement and personal acceptance and growth. 

 

The Personal - Most of my life I have felt the emotional pangs of parental enmeshment and death, insurmountable bodily anxiety, and perfectionistic conflict around who I am, and who I’ve wanted to be. As a child, I grew up with two very loving yet imperfect parents, who through no intentionality of their own passed on their own trauma, limiting beliefs, and unprocessed emotions. As an adolescent, I became adept at intellectualizing my experience, identifying patterns, and tying it all to the ‘big picture’. However, I struggled to safely process the associated emotions, and repattern how I conceived my internal world. I didn’t even know what that was supposed to look like. As I learned, the depth of my emotions, and the harmful patterns I experienced, surprised me. There was a lot more under the surface than I imagined. 

 

The Professional - Like many of us, work has been my primary outlet for development, validation, and satisfaction in my life. I rarely had a problem with keeping myself engaged with what I was doing, though I cycled in-and-out of burnout regularly. So, after working nearly a decade in a high-growth tech company, in 2020 I turned down an opportunity to succeed our CEO and instead pursued a Master’s in Counselling Psychology. My intention was to repurpose much of contemporary psychology’s most applicable practices and research into Organizational Development and Talent Strategy work, which I currently employ in my consulting practice. 

 

Today, while I have processed many of my most dysregulating emotions, created new meaning from past experiences, and brought a renewed balance to my internal bodily states, I am still very much on my own journey. Understanding ourselves, and repatterning with intention, is very much a life process. 

 

My Approach

 

My counseling approach is grounded in trauma-informed principles, shaped under the direct guidance of one of Canada’s top Clinical Traumatologists. Our experience of our lives, trauma or otherwise, is subjective and relative 一 we all see it a little differently. Thus, therapy must adapt to each person, and often I pull on aspects of humanistic, emotionally-focussed, CBT, and ‘parts work’ (like IFS) to assist me in speaking each client’s specific internal language.

 

I enjoy working with adults at the top of their careers (50+), and those who are still finding their unique superpowers (18 - 30), as I have found these periods often mark significant potential for meaningful change. My clients and I have often explored themes in trauma, performance, perfectionism, sensitivity, engagement, relational enmeshment , depression, anxiety, anger, death, and life purpose. I also maintain a large breadth of personal experience in understanding, relating to, and advocating for Indigenous peoples (who may feel plagued by systemic injustices and intergenerational trauma).

 

If you can relate to any of this and maintain an intention to grow and repattern your internal systems, I'd love to meet you. 

 

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