Counselling for justice involvement, violence and harm
A file can record what happened. It cannot hold a whole person.
There is the incident, offence, report, relationship or sentence. There is also the life around it, the history that came before it and the question of what happens now.
My background
This work has been part of my career from the beginning.
My early work was in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, alongside women fleeing violence and women engaged in street-based sex work for survival.
Later, I spent years delivering intensive group and individual interventions with men and women who had caused intimate partner violence and sexual harm. My more recent clinical work has included counselling with people living through intimate partner violence, coercive control and the complicated process of leaving, staying or trying to understand what happened.
I have sat with violence and harm from very different positions. That does not make those positions equivalent. It does mean I am comfortable with realities that rarely fit into clean categories: attachment to someone unsafe, shame after causing harm, survival choices, sexual harm, coercion, responsibility, grief, fear, loyalty and the possibility that several of those things are true at once.
Lives do not stay inside categories
A person can carry harm in more than one direction.
Someone can experience serious violence and later cause harm. A person may have used coercion in one relationship and been controlled in another. Responsibility for what they did can coexist with a history that shaped how they learned to attach, survive, use power or respond to threat.
We can take your history seriously alongside your responsibility for what you do. Counselling can include what happened, its impact and the rest of your life: relationships, shame, grief, fear, identity and what you want to change.
Domestic violence and coercive control
The relationship may contain love and still be organised around harm.
If you have been harmed
Attachment does not disappear simply because the relationship became unsafe. Leaving may feel impossible, necessary, devastating or all three.
Staying does not mean you consented to being controlled. Missing the person after leaving does not mean the decision was wrong.
Perhaps you fought back, returned, minimised what was happening or kept parts of it secret. None of those things makes you responsible for another person’s choice to control or harm you.
There is no requirement to arrive ready to leave, stay, report, cut contact or make a permanent decision. We can sit with what is true now, including the parts that pull in opposite directions.
If you have caused harm
You may be trying to understand what you did, its impact, or a pattern you have not known how to change. You may also be dealing with shame, loss, restrictions or uncertainty about what comes next.
We can examine your behaviour and its consequences while making room for the rest of your experience. Taking responsibility and being treated as a whole person belong in the same conversation.
Working with someone who caused harm does not require reducing them to it. Working with someone who was harmed does not require pretending the responsibility was shared equally.
When change is required
Conditions can alter a life before the person living it has caught up.
Abstinence may be mandatory long before sobriety feels chosen. A no-contact order can end communication without ending attachment. Treatment, curfews, restrictions and supervision may create change on paper while the internal argument is still very much alive.
You can follow a condition and resent it. Relief can coexist with loss. It is possible to understand why a restriction exists and still hate what it has taken from you.
There is no need to manufacture enthusiasm in counselling. We can sit with the difference between what is required, what you want and what you have not decided yet.
Leaving a life behind
Not wanting the consequences is different from knowing who you want to become.
A life connected to crime, substances or a particular subculture may also have offered belonging, identity, money, status, intensity, protection or a clear sense of where you fit.
Walking away can be necessary and still involve grief.
The legitimate life everyone recommends can be boring as hell. Work, bills, grocery shopping and early nights may represent stability. They can also feel painfully ordinary after a life built around intensity.
People you love may no longer be safe to keep close. The reputation, skills and relationships that gave you a place in one world may not translate easily into another. An old identity can stop fitting before a new one exists.
Intimacy after harm
Sex, desire and closeness may not feel the way they did before.
Violence, coercion, betrayal, incarceration and prolonged survival mode can change a person’s relationship with their body.
Some people avoid sex or physical closeness. Others keep having sex while feeling detached, uncertain or unable to tell what they want. Desire might disappear, return unexpectedly or become tangled with reassurance, fear, obligation, control, shame or the need to feel wanted.
A person harmed sexually can experience arousal, desire or pleasure without any of those responses changing the meaning of what happened. Someone who caused sexual or intimate harm may be trying to understand consent, pressure, rejection and whether closeness was genuinely mutual.
Partners reconnecting after violence, betrayal, separation or incarceration may discover that the relationship and their bodies have changed.
Loving someone through harm
Love is not a verdict.
You can love someone and believe they caused serious harm. You can want accountability and still answer the phone, attend the visit, advocate for them or grieve what is happening to their life.
Families and partners often get pushed toward a clean moral position. Support them or condemn them. Stay or leave. Forgive or cut contact. Actual relationships do not become simple because the situation demands an answer.
What counselling offers
Room for the rest of your life.
Sometimes there is something to understand, confront or change. We can do that work.
Other times, you need somewhere to say what is true without managing the response of a partner, family member, lawyer, institution or anyone else involved.
Perhaps you are grieving someone you cannot safely be with, living under conditions you resent, disconnected from your body, ashamed of something you did or facing an outcome that resolved very little.
Not every session needs to end with an insight or a plan. When there is something useful to work toward, we will. When there is no clean answer, we will not invent one.
Counselling can be a place to sit in it, with it and through the shit of it.
Privacy and practical questions
We can talk about privacy before you tell me the details.
It is reasonable to have questions about confidentiality, records and documentation before discussing justice involvement, violence or harm.
We can review the legal and ethical limits of confidentiality and talk through any concerns involving an employer, lawyer, benefits provider, court process or supervising authority before you share details.
If another person or organisation is paying for services or requesting documentation, we will clarify what information has been requested and what you are consenting to before proceeding.
Start with a fit check
You do not have to explain the whole situation.
A free 20-minute fit check gives us a chance to discuss what you are looking for, any practical concerns and whether working together makes sense. You do not need to describe the offence, relationship, allegation or harm in detail during the fit check.