Elizabeth Tolan
Counsellor
I specialise in:
About me
As a highly sensitive person with a family history of immigration, I come to this work as a result of 20 years of research into the arts as a refuge and life practice.
As life moved me, at times without a choice, I learned from a young age about loss and the innate capacity of the human organism to adapt to new environments and grow in relationship to change.
Over time, I came to know the arts as a place to recover a sense of belonging and connection when feeling lost or separate; providing a space to pause, reflect, and uncover a sense of self, meaning, and direction; as well as to situate one's experience in a greater context of transgenerational and societal influences.
Centralizing the wisdom of the body in this process became the essential ingredient to increasing resiliency and returning to a sense of wholeness.
I speak:
Location:
Approach
What can you expect?
Essentially, my practice is :
Person-centered – meaning I believe that you are the expert of your experience. As such, my rôle is to meet you where you are, and to accompany you with warmth and acceptance, together exploring practices that might support you in becoming your own therapist.
A somatic approach – focusing on the lived experience of the body-mind and cultivating curiosity towards any of the physical, sensory-motor, emotional, social, psychological, and/or spiritual aspects of our being in the world, including how they interact within and around us.
Resource-oriented – recognizing and building internal and external resources to support you in meeting life's challenges.
Arts-based – as there may be times when non-verbal expression is more accessible than verbalization. The arts can also support us in externalizing an experience or an event, giving us the opportunity to frame and even reframe the meaning we attribute to it, and then (re)integrate it for ourselves in a new way. You may choose to engage in movement, writing, drawing, photography, or voice. It is not necessary to have any previous experience.
Trauma-informed – I have studied the neurophysiological impact of trauma and somatic approaches to trauma recovery, including internal family systems, focusing, and active imagination.
