Soo Sen Lee

MSc, DPTRT, MCC, RCC

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I have been involved in the mental health field since 2014, serving individuals who face profound physical and mental health challenges.

Painful family relationships, debilitating anxiety and depression, burnout, sexual assault, and workplace bullying are just some of the traumas clients come to me for. All of these experiences sound profoundly difficult, yet my clients have taught me that in every person exists an incredible innate resilience. It has been my privilege to help many connect to this inner resource and watch them flourish despite everything that has happened to them. I believe this is a possibility for you.

Specialization

For our work together, I bring to the counselling space a trauma-informed approach, sensitive attunement, and care, especially when exploring overwhelming challenges that might be difficult to talk about in other spaces of life.

Clients who have found my approach especially helpful are individuals who :

  • are struggling with burnout*

  • identify as highly sensitive

  • live with ADHD or ADHD-like traits

  • feel constantly overwhelmed and stressed (including ADHD-related challenges)

  • have experienced early-life trauma due to neglect and/or abuse

  • desire to develop new and satisfying ways of relating to loved ones and family

  • want to create and maintain life-giving boundaries for work, life, and relationships

  • aspire to live responsively, rather than reactively, to life according to their inner values

  • long for a break from their chronic anxiety and/or depression cycles

  • seek to heal from profound grief and loss

  • experienced sexual assault

  • want to be free from shame

What to expect in a counselling session:

Using a gentle and attuned presence, my clients are invited into a safe relationship with me, so that they can relax and tune into what is really happening for them at their core. Our minds have a story, but our bodies have one as well. By bringing a sensitive awareness to our bodies, feelings, thoughts, and choices, my clients find themselves tuning into stresses, memories, and feelings that they had not even known existed.

They often express surprise to find unmet needs and longings that have been ignored for a long time or incongruent beliefs and hidden assumptions that have influenced their choices and actions. What is also surprising to some are the strength, solutions, and capacities that they already have.

Once brought into awareness, I work with clients to rework entrenched beliefs and choices that keep them stuck and refine skills that will move them forward while exploring new resources, tools, and alternate ways of responding. For highly sensitive persons, we will work on psychological and physical boundaries to create an internal and external buffer of calm so that you can move around the world without feeling you are bombarded by every sound, sight, and stimulus. With individuals who live with ADHD, I will also look at concrete skills to help with prioritization, productivity, and organization. Without these skills, people who live with ADHD have a higher risk, like highly sensitive persons, to burnout.

What can happen in therapy:

As a result of our work together, clients often say that they feel calmer and more grounded, are able to respond to challenges in ways that reflect their inner values, and feel more fulfilled and happy. A stronger sense of worth and confidence often emerges as a result of this integrity of values, choices and behaviours.

The mind-body approach have been shown to be especially helpful for those who have experienced relational traumas in their childhood and who are currently facing conflict with loved ones, friends, and co-workers.

My Training

I pull from several theoretical approaches based on the needs of my clients. My trainings, besides my Masters of Counselling from City University of Seattle in Canada, and my Masters of Experimental Medicine (UBC), also include:

  • Hakomi (Relational Somatic Depth Therapy)

  • Somatic Attachment Psychotherapy (Dr Lisa Mortimer; 2 year training)

  • Somatic Relational Transformation (Dr Sharon Stanley; trainer of Somatic Experiencing by Peter Levine; 2 year training)

  • Self-Trust and Integrated Resilience Method (STAIR Method, Dr Julianne Taylor Shore)

  • Internal Family Systems Informed (IFS)

  • EMDR

  • Interpersonal Neurobiology (Dr Dan Siegel)

  • Counselling Sexual Assault Survivors (Assoc. of Alberta Sexual Assault Services)

  • Neurobiology of Safety: Boundaries inside and out (by Dr Julianne Taylor Shore)

  • Narrative Therapy (VSTN)

  • Gottman Couples Therapy (Level 1)

  • Systematic Training for Effective Parenting

I welcome the use of faith-based worldviews for clients who would like to incorporate this lens into their healing.

Currently, Soo Sen is waitlisting clients, you can email her at soosen@coragecounselling.com If you are interested to be placed on her waitlist.

*For more information on trauma and burnout click here