Aside from virtual and walk-and-talk counselling, I offer ecotherapy as an option to my clients. It is a type of counselling that helps us build reciprocally healing connections with the green and blue world. This can include other animals (including people), plants, water, land, weather, and more.

(You may notice I do not use the term "natural world" or "nature." That is because even the human world of streets, parking lots, and houses is nature, as we are part of nature and what we do is an expression of nature, for better and for worse.)

Ecotherapy is a gentle, if not always easy, way to bring attention to our thoughts, emotions, body, and behaviours, and how they interact with ourselves and the world around us. We notice how our interactions with the world affect the other beings and forces around us, and how those, in turn, affect us. We use all this as a crucible to learn, explore, and change, all while strengthening our relationships with the green and blue world.

Ecotherapy can be an element of our work - such as a session here or there interspersed among our virtual sessions - or, the focus of our work, meaning we meet primarily outside. Meeting outside could mean we meet together, or it could mean that we meet over the phone and interact with green spaces in the geographical locations that work for each of us.

Meeting outside means meeting on public land, and being out in the elements. This changes the limits of confidentiality and the risks and benefits of counselling, and we will talk about this before meeting outside. In the assessment process we will meet online first and establish the terms of our work before starting sessions outdoors.

In the past, my clients have found ecotherapy helpful in terms of dealing with a broad range of concerns, including symptoms of anxiety and social anxiety, isolation and loneliness, depression, symptoms of seasonal affective disorder, trauma, life transitions, grief and loss, climate grief, climate anxiety, feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and much more.