Arts Expressive, Land-Based Modalities, and Mindfulness psychotherapist specializing in gifted children and adults
My name is Sinead and I specialize in supporting families as a whole unit. As products of our environments, a child's life quality is only as good as the health of their surrounding ecology. As such, helping parents find time to address their needs has a manifold effect: helping them, their partners and their children thrive.
My approach to care comes from my Masters in Psychotherapy and being raised by award-winning teachers and musicians in the Montessori, gifted, and private education systems. As the oldest of 10 grandchildren, I knew my passion for children from an early age and have taken to being a responsible role model for all children as if they are my family. My passion for care giving was further realized during my travels to Africa, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and Brazil, where I volunteered as Lead Counsellor to hundreds of children over the years.
More recently, I have enlisted land-based Indigenous teaching methods to kids at Clearwater Camp and the Chippewa First Nations of Georgina Island. There, I shared time in the forest creating art, foraging and cooking delicious food (think mushrooms and bannock on an open fire) and medicine with youth in stewardship of the land most of us have settled on. I led girls' empowerment workshops where we discovered ways to tune into our bodies and our institution when facing common social situations, such as peer pressure and body-image messaging. I also delivered workshops to expectant mums on how to incorporate healthy and wild foods, safe medicines, and financially-accessible methods of self-care.
I have guided 30 youth on a trek across America's national parks, teaching wilderness skills and ways to connect to each other, with natural spaces, and to our own internal rhythms. As a counsellor, lifeguard and chef to these kids, I come trained in risk-management, safety protocols, logistics, and leadership coordination to help you and your family guide and discover the life path best suited for your little ones.
I write children's books and provide creative workshops for kids and parents looking to express their internal world when words are not available. For this reason, I love to work with clay therapeutically to allow expression and engagement with the elements that have grounding, self-discovery, and recharging qualities.
While abroad, I was a nanny for families of doctors, professors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, nourishing their little ones with outdoor education, healthy meal preparation (with lots of hands-on sous-chefs), and frolics by the water. Over the past 20 years, I cared for dozens of families, providing overnight and evening care, home-schooling, coordination of playgroups and exploration sessions in arts, music, and nature.
Through my studies of International Development and Globalization at the University of Ottawa, and my Masters in psychotherapy and Mindfulness approaches at University of Toronto, I have come to realize that the way to make the world a better place is through education and empowerment at home. As a returning counsellor for the Ontario Co-operative Young Leaders Program designed to enhance financial skills and cooperative values in youth ages 14-18, I have been privileged to know the meaning of contributing to my diverse community.
As a student working towards CRPO and CASC certification in the University of Toronto MPS program, I am looking to provide nurturing and enriching direct-client therapy to families in need. This includes developing organizational structures in the home, education planning, parenting strategies around grief, social issues, emotional distress, trauma processing for parents working to prevent familial cycles from carrying on to the next generation, and at-home, place-based, where-needed support.
