hart is not currently taking new clients.
He is available for both virtual appointments and in-person sessions for current clients at our Vancouver clinic location. To be added to the wait list, please let us know by following the "book a free consultation" button below.
My fundamental orientation to counselling is existential. At its heart, this approach doesn’t distinguish between cognitions (thinking) and affect (emotions) and the somatic (body). Instead, it (and I) attempt to make contact with the whole of one’s being. After all, we don’t refer to ourselves as “human brains” or “human bodies” but as human beings. This is why talk therapy participates in healing the body, but it also explains why attention to the body can help heal what we generally call mental illness. And in the midst of it all, feelings are the endlessly rich source of information that help connect thinking to the body.
In this way, I don’t think of my practice as curative. Rather, I think of the movement that is achieved in therapy as-being-towards-authenticity: i.e., when one’s interior and exterior and thinking, feeling, and bodily experiences are in concert. The task of therapy, then, is simply to learn to speak in and with one’s own voice.
One of the great therapists of the last 50 years, Irvin Yalom, wrote that “the relationship is the therapy.” This is the cornerstone of my own thinking and practice.
Here, a feeling is, in actuality, a fact. Let me make a stronger claim: all feelings are facts. They are facts in the same way that the table I am sitting at currently is made of wood and that I am a psychotherapist. All are part of the same category of thing we call facts.
But there is a central issue that I have with the literature on adhd, and this is a problem with this book and with the field more generally. My issue is this: why distraction? Or perhaps the question could be asked in the following way: distraction from what?
We are pleased to announce that starting on Monday, July 24, 2023, we will be launching a new way that clients will begin their therapeutic relationships with Senior Clinicians (Senior and Directorial Clinicians) at Nightingale Counselling and Research.
While I’m no expert, I’ve learned about dream work by doing. My Jungian therapists over the past 18 years have helped me tend to this part of myself and it was likely the greatest education I could’ve received. The only hard-and-fast rule that I’ve gleaned is that the client, not the therapist, needs to take the lead in terms of offering their feelings, their interpretations, their point of view about their dream
Perfectionism causes personal and professional problems for perfectionists themselves and those around them. And, in a bitter twist of irony, it turns out to be an inefficient and ineffective way of producing good work with any consistency. Perfectionism is not segregated in any single population, but it is one of the most common difficulties experienced by people with adhd.
In Part 1 of Feelings vs Emotions, I explored the definitional and substantive differences between feelings and emotions. I wrote about the relationship between interoception—the senses that offer information about the state of our body—and the binary feeling of good/bad. In today’s post, I will focus on emotions. “Emotions,” as Damasio notes in Part 1 “indicate actions,” and then later describes them as “concerts of actions.”
For the past 14+ months, I have had the privilege of having Hart as my therapist. During this time, I’ve navigated the most challenging season of my life, including my mother and father’s concurrent cancer diagnoses and the eventual death of my father. This all while managing a set of complex personal circumstances that at times bordered on comedic absurdity.
Throughout this season, Hart was present to bear witness to me navigating each new challenge. At all times he did so with a steady sincerity, providing the comfort of a therapeutic perspective without coddling. He challenged my assumptions and beliefs, offered his candid view when requested, and showed empathy and emotion that highlighted things I had overlooked. As such, Hart and Nightingale have played an integral role in my life this season and for this I’m super grateful. I highly recommend! ☺️
I was in a bad state when I started with nightingale counselling in late 2021. When I reached out for help I was met with a compassion that immediately made me feel like I was in good hands. I was quickly directed to a clinic to receive a diagnosis and ongoing support during and after the diagnostic process. This has been instrumental in my recovery and development. Since starting I’ve found that this is unlike any counselling/therapy you’re likely to encounter. You are made to feel fully seen, understood and supported in whatever you come to table with.
You feel like you are developing a relationship with a real human and not a stiff, stony faced, stand-offish therapist who says nothing in response to your outpourings. There is open conversation and interchange of ideas between you and the counsellor that I have found has helped me affect change within myself in a consistent and meaningful way that I’ve not experienced with other Counsellors over the years.
I can’t endorse Hart and the folks at Nightingale highly enough for the work they do. More importantly, the way they do it.