UNA GAIR, MA, RCC, CCC
I came to counselling through the messy end of human behaviour.
Long before private practice, my work brought me alongside people and communities dealing with trauma, violence, shame, risk, accountability, and change. I learned early that people rarely make sense when we strip away their histories, relationships, and circumstances; and that understanding how something happened is not the same as pretending it caused no harm.
That still shapes how I work. I’m warm, direct, curious, and hard to shock. Sometimes the immediate task is to reduce the distress, get through the week, or work out what to do next. Sometimes we will look closely at old patterns and where they came from. Usually, the work holds more than one thing at a time.
You do not have to make the story cleaner or yourself simpler before you come in.
WHAT SHAPED MY WORK
I did not begin in private practice.
My path into counselling was not a straight line from graduate school into private practice. It grew out of nearly two decades of work across federal public safety and, since 2013, community safety and systems work with House of Wolf & Associates. For much of that time, those two strands of my work ran alongside each other.
Much of my career was spent working directly with people convicted of sexual and violent offences. I facilitated intensive correctional intervention, worked with structured risk assessment and case planning, and supported people moving from institutions back into the community. The settings and roles changed over time—from frontline work to national training, policy, and systems reform—but the central question remained remarkably consistent: what actually helps people change when the stakes are high and easy answers are useless?
That work required me to stay present with things that were difficult to hear and difficult to hold. It meant working with trauma without using it to erase responsibility; understanding shame without treating it as a change strategy; recognizing risk without reducing a person to it; and looking beneath denial, avoidance, anger, and defensiveness to understand what might make meaningful change possible.
At the same time, my work with House of Wolf & Associates has taken me into First Nations communities and Indigenous-led work in community safety, justice, wellness, governance, policy, and systems development. That work has taught me to keep looking beyond the individual—to relationships, histories, communities, institutions, power, and the conditions that can either support healing and change or make both much harder.
My clinical training broadened the ways I understand and approach the human condition. I do not work from a single theory, because people do not arrive with one kind of problem. Sometimes the immediate need is practical: reduce distress, interrupt a harmful pattern, build skills, or make daily life more manageable. Sometimes the work is slower and more exploratory—understanding history, relationships, attachment, identity, grief, meaning, or the parts of ourselves that do not make immediate sense. Often, it is some combination of both.
I am interested in you as the whole person, including the parts that do not fit neatly together. I will not reduce you to a diagnosis, a coping pattern, something that happened to you, or something you regret doing.
The approach should fit you as a person and the work in front of us, not the other way around.