Finding Self Fulfillment in Ontario, Canada

You are an LGBTQ+ immigrant of colour who is tired of being in limbo from indecision and confusion. You want to be in control of your life and have a fulfilling life in work, relationships, and creative pursuits while honouring your sense of social justice. Therapy can help in finding self fulfillment in Ontario, CA by understanding your inner world and translating your desires into action.

Finding a self fulfillment therapist who has these identities and has achieved fulfillment for themselves can make this process of gaining clarity very satisfying and empowering. A therapist who has achieved a fulfilling life while honouring their sense of social justice, and sees it as integral to a fulfilling life.

I am BIPOC (East Asian Taiwanese), LGBTQ+ affirming, with an anti-oppressive point of view, and understand the immigrant experience. Moreover, I’ve spent my life finding the path to fulfillment and helping others do the same.

Being True to Yourself, and Staying that way

Being clear about who you are and your values, and expressing them in your life through your voice, actions, and relationships. Even in times when they cannot be met right away or completely, you know how to continuously look for opportunities where your values can be realized.

Have Meaningful Relationships

Your relationship with yourself and significant others reflects back the values you hold. You trust yourself to make good decisions and have the capacity to improve your life as you desire. You set healthy boundaries with your loved ones and with yourself, and you honour others and your own needs as best you can.

Sense of Agency

Feeling that you have the power to live the life you want. Feeling fulfilled in the choices you have made, including your work. Even if the current life situation is imperfect, you are still able to find fulfillment and choice in what you do, such as how you want to show up at work, and who to build rapport with.

Creative fulfillment

Feeling that you can express yourself and explore who you are in ways that are new to you, and pursuing these endeavors with no end goal in mind, but just for the fun of it. Using your creative expression to tell your story, because you believe they are worth telling and sharing with the world.

Healthy Relationship with Your Emotions

To have a healthy, friendly, and supportive relationship with your emotions. You know how to identify your emotions, stay grounded when you feel big emotions, and approach them with a collaborative and friendly attitude. You know how to be with your emotions without feeling completely overwhelmed.

Kind self-talk that’s fair, compassionate, and curious

To have a kind inner self-talk when you feel difficult emotions, and approach your emotions with patience and curiosity.

Actively practice understanding your emotions

Knowing that your emotions are not your enemies, but are critical pieces of information to tell you who you are, your values, what you need, and your limits. And you need to actively practice this attitude as you encounter your emotions, for as long as you live.

Healthy Relationship to other’s emotions

You also need to be able to have healthy boundaries with other people’s emotions. To be able to be flexible in response to their emotions, starting with being able to stay grounded when they are emotional. Having flexible ways to take in the info that comes in from your emotions and others, and being flexible and dynamic in your response.

The key is having your needs and values met at work. We rarely find paid work that is meaningful and fulfilling completely right away (If you have, that’s great, you deserve it!). Finding fulfillment and meaning is not an all-or-nothing task. A smart way to go about it is to gradually increase the degree of satisfaction with change in jobs/position/behaviour/mindset. This means being able to recognize and seize little opportunities to realize fulfillment and accumulate them into a great sense of satisfaction.

It is building a dynamic relationship with yourself. To experience yourself in new ways beyond social conventions and binary understanding of success and failure. To express yourself in diverse ways and foster new understandings about yourself, as well as new connections to different parts of you. To engage in something that may be scary, uncomfortable, unknown, or messy. And through these practices express your values, needs, and desires. For example, you may enjoy outdoor sports, and choose to learn paddle boarding through an Indigenous organization that is respectful of the environment.

Create a healthy relationship with failure

Cultivating healthy relationships with uncertainty and disappointment. There will be times the creative endeavour does not yield the results you had hoped for or the reception you had desired. To see these less-exciting outcomes as part of connecting to who you are, as opposed to a binary view of success and failure.

• Feel Empowered.

  Feeling that what they do in the world matters. They feel hopeful about their own future and the world’s because they have the power to shape it.

• Know how much they actually need.

  They know the difference between living a prosperous and comfortable life instead of one driven by greed and hoarding wealth. They know when something feels “enough”, because they have faced their needs and desires head-on and know what they want in life. They also use their values to inform how to meet their needs, such as knowing the amount of money they’d like to make to live a comfortable life, and through what means.

• Grounded Confidence in navigating uncertainty.

  They are proud of who they are while having a process for deciding how to change themselves when they choose to. They also have good insight on when something is not their responsibility to care for and can let it go with dignity and compassion.

• Committed to pursuing their dreams in a very imperfect world.

  They know how to live a life aligned with their values and influence change consistently, even when change seems impossible. Instead of giving up and feeling futile about what they can do to change the world, they choose to do what they can in their daily lives. All while still caring for their lives. For example, they are against large corporations raising food prices for profit, and they choose to spend their money on local small businesses wherever they can, and supporting community fridges. Plus, they give themselves compassion when they cannot afford to do so.

You need a process of knowing what you lack and how to meet the lack.

Understand what you are lacking

Often people just know they feel unfulfilled but don’t know what it is. To break out of this, you need to start learning how to listen to your internal world.

Listening involves examining your lack of fulfillment and being able to understand from your emotions, thoughts, and body sensations its exact nature. For example, you may describe your partnership as stable and unfulfilling. As you sit with this information, your whole internal world will “speak” to you in thoughts, emotions, and body sensations about the different aspects of your unfulfillment. If you have the skills to organize and take them in, you can become aware that you feel guilty and have thoughts of “I am ungrateful and too greedy.” From this information, there is now more nuance to your unfulfillment struggle, with one part of it being feeling guilty about your desires.

Replace the Lack with What Fulfills You

Knowing part of your unfulfillment is caused by guilt, the first step to meeting what’s lacking is to validate your desire. Particularly learning how to cope with it while you are pursuing activities that will make you feel fulfilled. Carrying this out can happen in endless ways. This can include talking to your partner and/or finding new friends/interests/activities to enliven your life.

You need a process of deepening your way of knowing and using the info to take actions that will add fulfillment.

Know how to listen to your internal world

If you know how to listen to the messages from your thoughts, emotions, and body, they will tell you what you value, what you need, and what are your limits. For example, you can notice you feel immense joy when surrounded by friends who share your love of nature, even if you only meet with them once in a while. This info will let you know that you may need to see these friends more often, especially during times of stress, so you are better cared for.

Know how to evolve your ways of knowing

Your process of understanding your internal world, such as acquiring new ways of knowing. You may be accustomed to relying on your thoughts to understand yourself. But, as your body changes through age, disability, activities, and relationships, it may become increasingly important for you to listen to your body. Your body can be an incredible source of information in telling you what your limits are. Case scenario: you may want to force yourself to meet regularly with a family member. But, the debilitating fatigue you feel afterward tells you that you cannot afford to do so ongoingly, and would have to change how you meet with this person.

Meeting your needs in gradual steps

Adding fulfillment happens in increments. You need to be able to break down what you need into small and doable steps, and pay continuous attention to ways you can gradually meet them. Doing so will allow you to feel sprinkles of fulfillment in unfulfilling situations, and keep you energized on your pursuit.

Know how to deal with setbacks

You also need to have a supportive process with disappointing outcomes and longing and delay in achieving what you want. This requires you to value and validate your dreams, even when they seem impossible. Often people will criticize themselves for not fully achieving their dream life in a specific timeframe, and this actually sets them back and causes them to lose motivation.

Believe in Fulfilling Yourself

You need to have hope and believe your fulfillment is important, even if you can’t meet them right away or meet them to your complete satisfaction.

For example, you may start to feel your existing friend group is no longer fulfilling, as the main topic is always about making money and taking foreign vacations. You still enjoy these topics, but you are also starting to be interested in your local community and how to cultivate new hobbies where you live. Knowing this you may even try bringing up your interest in this group, and see how things go, as a way to meet your needs. Just by choosing to share, you are honouring your need in a small and significant way. In the event your existing friends do not share your interests, you can expand your ways of meeting your needs by exploring other social spaces to cultivate this side of yourself.

Fulfillment is such a personal thing, so the greatest source of knowledge is you. You need to be able to notice, interpret, and understand your internal world to know ongoingly what you want, and take action to add fulfillment.

How I help you understand your internal world

In therapy, as you begin talking about how you feel in your life, I will ask you how it feels to talk about this topic and ask you to take a moment to check out your thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. I will also educate you on how to interpret what you feel. For example, you may say you feel angry about your job. In my telling you anger is often a sign that something important to you is being threatened, we can then infer something valuable to you is being lost in your work. Often, new clients will not know how to describe what they feel but can tell if someone’s guess is an accurate description. I will make educated guesses about the reason for your anger, such as “Sounds like you get mad every time your coworker doubts your motives, my guess is you value being seen as authentic and truthful?” Your job is then to tell me how close am I to naming what you feel by telling me “Yes that’s right”, “No that’s not it” or “A little bit but it’s more about this other thing…”

Translating the understanding into action

In understanding how you feel about work, the next step is using the information to inform your next steps, which can mean internal and/or external action. This may be validating your anger, instead of trying to ignore it, judge yourself for it and make it worse. This can include knowing how to care for your body when you feel angry (like taking a breath, focusing on what you can change), instead of seeing these sensations as inconveniences to be overcome or shut off. It can also mean protecting what it is you are losing at work, like making sure your voice is heard and clarifying when others misunderstand you.

Therapy approaches I use to achieve this are:

Emotion-focused therapy. This starts with guiding you to slow down and notice what emotions you have, and teaching you how to interpret them. I will educate you on what emotions could mean, and make educated guesses about what you feel.

Mindfulness.This starts with asking you to slow down and notice what comes up. Whether it’s thoughts, emotions, or body sensations, without judgment. Doing this allows you to fully hear the information without prematurely shutting down and missing out on vital information to your internal world.

Parts work. This is a key skill to use in resolving internal conflicts. We live in a world where we are often told by many voices, including loved ones, society, and our various home cultures about what is a fulfilling life. Often we were also socialized to minimize our own voices. Or if we feel conflicted inside we go with what’s popular. The ability to resolve internal conflicts ongoingly, and hear all the voices that pipe up when faced with pursuing fulfillment is a critical skill that needs to be learned and honed for life. I will note the different voices that come up for you when making a decision. Then, I will ask you guided questions to understand each part’s desires and motivations. I will teach you how to use mindfulness to find your most authentic and wise voice and teach you how to use that voice to make decisions on which desires to prioritize.

Have your Life Reflect Your Values

Having relationships that reflect back the value you want. Have relationships, including one with yourself, that reflect back the values you hold. This often includes feeling a sense of pride, safety, comfort, and hope in relationships.

Healthy Connections to all parts of you

Having a healthy, empowering, and compassionate narrative about your life experiences and your desires makes you feel confident about your life. Such a narrative is developed from truthfully reflecting on your values, your life experiences, and relationships, as opposed to letting social convention dictate how to tell the story of your life.

Still Caring for Your Values in Difficult Situations

Seeing yourself able to weather the difficulties in life while caring for your dreams gives a great sense of agency, power, and fulfillment. It is as if you are standing in the rapids, but you are solid as a rock, and the water, though does splash on you, cannot knock you over. You know that despite living in a world that is ugly and oppressive in many areas, you know how to navigate and build the life and space you desire within it. For example, you may work at a company full of unkind people, but you can form a subgroup of colleagues who share the same values and support each other.

Meeting your Needs

Knowing how to give yourself what you deserved but didn’t have growing up, in a format that’s available to you now is incredibly rewarding. Because it tells you though you cannot change your past, you have the power in your present. For example, you grew up with your parents rarely ever home, and you don’t know what it’s like to have your parents play with you. You cannot change history, but the need to be seen and have a sense of play with a trusted loved one can still be achieved in adulthood. Like having a friend who also enjoys being goofy or exploring a new game with you without any agenda/goal in mind.

• Meaningful Connection

  Where everyone involved can be themselves, because there is kindness and generosity to each other, and clear communication between all parties.

• A healthy attitude about conflict

  There is a shared understanding that both change and conflict are natural parts of relationships. There is understanding and curiosity when there are conflicts, and a willing attitude to validate and respect the other person’s point of view, even if you disagree. There’s also the recognition that it is not about being perfect in relationships (as it is impossible), but knowing how to take accountability and repair if harm happens.

• A healthy balance between being independent and dependent

  You feel you can rely on your partner(s), friends, and family while also being independent, and being able to ongoingly strike a healthy balance between the two. You also are willing to accept there will be times your partner and/or friend will not be able to meet your needs, and that it is a normal part of all relationships.

• Open to pushing the status quo in favour of authenticity and freedom

  There is openness from all parties to examine any existing presumptions they have about human identity and relationships (such as gender roles, sexuality, and valuing partnership over friendships), to be more authentic and caring to each other in the relationships.

• Healthy Investment in each other’s growth

  You can validate and hold your partner(s)’/friends’/family’s best interest at heart, even if it conflicts with what you want. You’re invested in helping them grow, and it can involve you or be separate from you. You are also aware at the end of the day, it is each individual’s responsibility to take charge of their own growth.

It starts with your values.

Taking Risks

To have the capacity to try something new and challenging, not for any particular goal, but as a means to express yourself and explore further who you are. Say you value hearing about others’ experiences/stories, then sharing your story in some way (poetry, script, dance) may be a venue for you to try expressing who you are, and feel a healthy amount of discomfort while at it.

Honouring your voice and desires

To know that expressing yourself is valuable. That you have something to say, and that in itself is worth exploring and expressing, no matter what others’ reception may be.

What is creative fulfillment?

To express yourself in diverse ways and foster new understandings about yourself, as well as new connections to different parts of you. To engage in something that may be scary, uncomfortable, unknown, and messy. At the core, it is building a dynamic relationship with yourself. To experience yourself in new ways beyond typical scripts and your understanding of success and failure.

Expressing your values

Infusing your values into the way you seek creative pursuits. Such as making objects that represent what’s important to you, or using your talent to support causes you believe in, when there is no guarantee there will be a “reward” for doing so.

Healthy relationship with failure

There will be times the creative endeavour does not yield the results you had hoped for or the reception you had desired. To see these less-exciting outcomes as part of the exploration process, versus a definite evaluation about the worthiness of your pursuit.

We live in a world that often tells us what we should want. Most of us are so good at following the rules in order to be accepted that over time we forget what we truly want. The reality is our desires never go away, but are waiting for the opportunity to surface again, which tends to create a lot of disruption.

• What is your Fee?

  Individual sessions are $400/60 minute session

  Couples session is $500/75 minute session.

• Why is your fee so high compared to some therapists?

  The fee is a reflection of the quality of service you get from a therapist who lives what they preach in having fulfillment, and the expertise of having helped people of different life stages find fulfillment. I have an established approach to helping people find fulfillment in an imperfect world, and tailor it to what works best for each client. This approach has been developed through learning from experts and actual client experience in my 10-plus years of doing this work.

  There is no shortage of providers who offer therapy for a fulfilling life, but while you’re shopping around, please pay attention to how many of them have lived what they preached, and can break down for you the specific methods they use, and how they can tailor it to meet your needs.

  My long-term clients tell me the only thing they dislike about working with me is the financial cost, but they believe the insight and freedom they’ve gained are well worth the money.

  I believe mental health services should be accessible to all. I also believe healthcare providers need to make a livable wage in order to provide the best service. This accessibility is the responsibility of our social stakeholders and government leaders. If there comes a day when psychotherapy is subsidized by the government and still allows me to make a livable income, I will lower my fee.

• What sets your practice apart from other therapists?

  In my view it is rare to find a therapist who has both lived and professional understanding of being LGBTQ+ (I am Queer and Nonbinary), being a person of color, and an immigrant, while having strong social justice values. It is even more rare to find one who has lived and professional knowledge of having it all in life, including fulfillment in work, relationships, and creative pursuits. While teaching healthy relationships is an expertise many therapists have, my general observation is some fewer providers know how to help clients live a life beyond “not having problems”. I believe life is so much more than “not having problems”, so I cater to clients who want to learn deeply about what they desire and how to make it happen. I disagree with the idea that you can only pick one or two between the choices of meaningful work, healthy relationships, creative pursuits, and fulfilling your sense of social justice. I believe you can have it all because I’ve done it for myself and my clients.

• How soon will I see results in therapy?

  While I cannot guarantee results for everyone, generally my clients begin to have clarity and feel better between 6-12 sessions. They have a greater understanding of why they feel stuck and unfulfilled, and can see other ways to compassionately understand their stuckness, and see some possible actions to take. They also have learned better skills at managing their emotions and using them to inform their daily choices, which adds to a sense of control and fulfillment. Even if no external actions have been taken, they can live their current life with greater clarity and freedom internally, knowing there is a path to add to their fulfillment. I have had many clients who by the 12th session, can actively stop a negative spiral/pattern they have suffered from for decades, and experience the fulfilling feeling of liberation and agency in their relationships to self and others.

• How do I know you are the right therapist for me?

  It comes down to what you value and how you like to learn. If you value the following things, I may be the right therapist for you:

  • You value social justice and want to make the world a better place.
  • You value your own needs and dreams, such as living a comfortable life and pursuing your dreams.
  • You believe in having it all: fulfilling work, enriching relationships, and enlivening creative pursuits.
  • You believe your relationships with yourself and others are a cornerstone of life fulfillment. And clarity and skills in relationships are worth investing in.
  • You value being a kind and boundaried person in all areas of your life.
  • You value personal growth and want to keep growing and evolving for as long as you live.
  • You value professional expertise that can help you gain life-long skills that will give you a sense of control in your life.
  • You like working with people with a kind sense of humour and sharp insight, and enjoy learning from those who are personable, relatable, and guides you to arrive at your own authentic decision versus dictating what you should do.

• What is the process if I am interested to work with you?

  1. Contact Me.
     • You can email me on my website here, or call me and leave a voice mail.
     • Email is the fastest way to reach me
  2. Check for logistic Fit
     • I will then email you with information about my practice (fee, appointment availability). This is to ensure we use our time wisely, as it doesn’t make sense to have further discussions if our schedules don’t match or I don’t fit your budget.
  3. Free Phone consultation
     • We schedule a 30-min free phone consultation.
     • During the consult I will ask you:
       • Why are you interested in therapy?
       • What changes would you like to see if therapy worked for you?
       • How often and long do you expect to be in therapy?
     • These questions help me understand your goals, and I will let you know by the end of the consult whether I am the right fit for you.
  4. After Consult: Referral or First session
     • During the consult, if either one of us feels we are not the right fit, I will provide you referrals to at least two other therapists.
     • If we both feel we are a good fit, we schedule a first session (60-minute video) to see how we connect during an hour-long session.