Stef - Approach - Stef Quinton Counselling and Consulting

My Approach

Experiential, relational, process-based, and emotion-focused.

This basically means that I focus in really deeply on your “here and now” experience of what’s happening within you and between us in the session to help you move towards lasting change.

Together, we’ll gently tune into your inner world, getting to know all of the contours, the jagged edges and raw spots, help you process the painful experiences that shaped that terrain, befriend your emotions (even when they’re heavy or hard), and move you out of negative cycles that keep you stuck.

What’s critically important to me is that our sessions help you get to the heart of what’s hurting you, and that our relationship becomes a safe haven for you to have the reparative emotional experiences that are at the heart of good psychotherapy.

This is a small practice on purpose

My practice is purpose-built to ensure our work together is well worth the time, emotion, and financial investment that you’re making into it. Below is what sets my practice apart.

1. Small client base

Each of my clients get the very best of me. I commit to consistent, engaging, and high-quality care.

2. Narrow scope of practice

I am highly trained and experienced in my areas of specialization. My clients can benefit from the depth of knowledge and practice wisdom that I’ve cultivated in these areas over the past decade.

3. Beyond coping techniques

We'll focus on going deep to get to what we know drives the very best therapy outcomes - the therapeutic relationship and engaging emotions in a way that shapes meaningful change.

4. A blended approach

Both analysis and intuition guides my combined approach of empathetic listening, compassionate attunement, and lots of feedback, insight, and guidance.

5. A human focus

You are a person; not a collection of symptoms. I’ll understand your current challenges through the lens of what once helped you survive some really difficult stuff.

The Process

Meet & Greet

We’ll start with a free 15-minute phone or video call so that we can get to know each other and see if we’re a good fit. If we're both feeling good about it, we’ll book our first session together.

Assessment Session

This is where I'll really get to know you. We’ll talk about the changes you’re hoping to make through therapy, and set a collaborative vision for how our work will help you get there.

Therapy Unfolds

We’ll work together to help you cultivate emotional balance, uproot negative beliefs about yourself, process the pain of the past, and recapture a sense of meaning and vitality in life.

Approaches I Use

I apologize for how rampant acronyms are in our field! Here are the approaches I draw from to help people move towards greater authenticity, wholeness, and wellbeing.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT evolved from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This mindfulness-based therapy focuses on helping people develop a more compassionate relationship with the thoughts and feelings that cause them pain, and empowers them to take committed action in daily life that reflects their deeply held values, even when difficult emotions or challenging circumstances are part of the picture.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR taps into the brain’s natural ability to heal by using guided eye movements (among other methods) to help people process and reduce the lasting emotional and somatic impact of distressing memories and traumatic experiences.
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)
Highly effective for anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, ERP aims to liberate people from the safety behaviours that sometimes keep them locked in a negative cycle with distressing, unwanted, or disturbing thoughts. ERP is all about helping people face their fears, in incremental and gradual ways, and discover how brave they actually are so that anxious or obsessive thoughts aren’t in the “driver’s seat” of their lives anymore.
Emotion-Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)
EFIT focuses on helping people cultivate a resilient, secure, and coherent sense of self by exploring and resolving the deeper emotional pain that keeps them trapped in negative cycles with themselves and other people.
Dialectical-Behavioural Therapy (DBT)
Another evolution of CBT, DBT is all about equipping people with a core set of skills to manage their emotions more effectively, improve their relationships with other people, and tolerate distress in helpful ways.

Guiding Values

Safety

My top priority in our work together is making sure that you consistently sink into a felt sense of safety in our sessions. I want our sessions to be a place where you can genuinely let your guard down and be yourself without fear of judgment, rejection, or criticism; where your nervous system can really unwind and be fully at ease. We’ll also pace our work carefully, not moving too fast or too slow, in order to honour where you’re at while moving steadily towards meaningful change.

Authenticity

One of my most cherished values in life is healthy vulnerability, which is really only made possible in an atmosphere of emotional and psychological safety.

I want you to bring your unvarnished self to our sessions, knowing that I’ll never throw platitudes at you, or oversimplify what you’re going through, or reduce you to something that fits neatly into a pre-existing theoretical framework. In turn, you can expect me to bring my full self to our sessions, and not a hollow persona.

Collaboration

I will always defer to you as the expert on your own life. I view the therapeutic relationship as a partnership where we’ll walk together through the different phases and seasons of our work, and where openness and honesty about how things are going and how you’re feeling is wholeheartedly welcomed and actively encouraged. I view therapy as something that is done with, not done to, and so our work will position you to take an active role in your own healing by prompting you to get curious about yourself, your emotions, your history, and your in-the-moment experience of our sessions.

New to virtual therapy?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is virtual therapy like?
Comfortable, convenient, and intimate. In my experience of providing online therapy for almost four years now, I’ve heard clients comment on how much they value the ability to connect with me from the comfort of their own homes, not have to deal with traffic on the way to and from the appointment, and bring personal things like blankets and pets into our sessions to make the process of opening up and getting into the work together that much easier for them.

As a therapist who has done in-person work and virtual work, I can honestly say that my relationships with present-day virtual clients are just as strong as the relationships I’ve built with past in-person clients. And of course it’s a pleasure to see my clients’ pets from time to time!
What are your rates?
Individual therapy is $175 for a 50 minute session. The sessions are 50 minutes long to give me a little break between clients to write notes, have a quick snack, and get myself ready for my next client. They ensure that my clients get the most refreshed and engaged version of when we meet.

Since my practice is very small on purpose, my fee allows me to do excellent work with fewer clients, which means that I can devote more time to taking trainings and workshops that will benefit my clients directly, and take care of the practical and financial sides of running a business without having to compromise my commitment to high-quality care.
How long will therapy take?
The length of therapy will vary greatly from person to person. Some people come to therapy looking to work on a very specific goal, whereas other people might want to delve into longstanding concerns (such as a persistent feeling of unlovability) that might be connected to past trauma or other kinds of painful life events. When this is the case, therapy tends to be longer because we’ll be getting down to the roots of the issue, which takes time and care. I’ll be able to give you a better idea of what to expect based on what I learn about your unique goals and personal history during our assessment sessions.
Will insurance cover our sessions?
Most insurance plans will cover services provided by a Registered Social Worker (RSW), which is what I am. It’s always a good idea to check your coverage beforehand just to be sure.
Do you offer direct billing?
Unfortunately, I don’t offer direct billing. After our sessions, I’ll send you a detailed receipt that you’ll be able to submit to your insurance provider for reimbursement.
What happens in therapy?
What happens over the course of therapy and within each individual session will look quite different from person to person, depending on your goals for therapy, life circumstances, and a host of other factors. With that said, there is an overarching direction that therapy tends to flow in, consisting of different phases that each have a distinct focus:

Assessment

During the first couple of sessions, we’ll start to get to know each other, develop a shared understanding of what’s brought you to therapy and what you’re hoping to get out of it, and create a collaborative roadmap of where we’re heading together in our work.

Safety and Stabilization

This is where I’ll help you learn some really valuable skills to help you manage distress in healthy ways, navigate key relationships in your life more effectively, and improve your day-to-day quality of life so that you can feel more confident, capable, and internally steady.

Getting to the Roots

We’ll uncover and address the deeper issues that sit underneath some of the challenges you’re facing. This might involve reshaping your relationship with or restorying entrenched negative beliefs about yourself, reprocessing painful or traumatic events that have happened in your life, and addressing and repairing any lasting attachment-related wounds that you’ve carried with you over the years. We’ll focus on helping you develop new, healthier emotional patterns and responses to yourself that will set you up for continued growth well beyond the virtual therapy room.

Meaning and Vitality

This is such a beautiful phase in the process of therapy. We’ll focus on helping you use your newfound confidence, insight, and understanding to build a life that’s reflective of your hopes, ambitions, and deeply held values. We’ll gently reduce the frequency of our sessions at this point, and the sessions we do have will focus on helping you navigate any new challenges that arise and supporting you with maintaining and expanding on the progress you made in therapy.