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 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.