Reveal Your Inner Strength
For those navigating relationships that ask you to lose yourself, the heartbreak of addiction, and grief that isn’t always understood.
Online counselling across British Columbia for Addiction, Boundaried Grief, and emotionally harmful relationships, including Narcissistic Abuse, Antagonistic Relational Stress, and Codependency.
Narcissistic Abuse & Antagonistic Relational Stress
Boundaried Grief
Living With Loss Without Losing Yourself
Codependency /
Love Addiction
My Counselling Focus
Compassionate, Trauma-Informed Support
I’m Christine, a Master Practitioner of Clinical Counselling, offering compassionate, trauma-informed support for individuals navigating addiction, complex grief, and emotionally harmful relationships.
I work with those:
living with or loving someone struggling with substance use or behavioural addictions
navigating their own recovery journey
grieving the loss of a loved one due to addiction, drug poisoning, or related complications
and those experiencing the effects of narcissistic abuse, antagonistic relationship patterns, and codependency.
These experiences can leave you feeling emotionally exhausted, hypervigilant, disconnected from yourself, or unsure how to move forward without losing important parts of who you are.
Together, we focus on rebuilding your internal sense of safety, developing more steady and sustainable boundaries, and creating space for healing, grief, recovery, and greater clarity.
What is Boundaried Grief?
I offer support for what I call Boundaried Grief: learning how to carry loss while protecting what feels sacred about your relationship with your loved one.
This includes becoming more intentional about where your grief is shared, who has the capacity to hold it, and how to stay connected to your own emotional wellbeing while continuing to move through the world.
What Can I Expect From Counselling?
Starting Where You Are
Counselling with me begins with where you are right now, whether you are living alongside someone struggling with substance use or behavioural addictions, navigating your own recovery journey, grieving a loss shaped by addiction or drug poisoning, or experiencing the ongoing impact of narcissistic, antagonistic, or emotionally harmful relationships.
Making Sense of Complex, Layered Experiences
These experiences are often layered, emotionally exhausting, and deeply personal. Over time, they can leave you hyper-aware of others’ needs, disconnected from your own internal sense of self, or unsure how to move forward without losing important parts of who you are.
In our work together, we slow things down and begin making sense of what you’ve been carrying.
No Pressure to Make Immediate Decisions
Rather than rushing toward decisions about relationships, we first focus on understanding your experience, strengthening your emotional footing, and helping you reconnect with yourself.
Many of the relationships you are navigating may be deeply meaningful or tied to love, responsibility, family, or grief. They are often far more complex than simply staying or leaving.
Learning to Stay Connected Without Losing Yourself
This is where boundaried work becomes important, learning how to stay connected to others without losing connection to yourself.
This may include:
recognizing your emotional limits
understanding what is and isn’t yours to carry
responding with greater intention instead of reactivity
and developing boundaries that feel steady, realistic, and self-honouring.
Read more: The Benefits of Therapy When Leaving Is Not an Option
A Path That Reflects Your Unique Experience
For some, this work includes exploring relational patterns that contribute to emotional exhaustion, hypervigilance, people-pleasing, or self-abandonment.
For others, this work may involve supporting a loved one through active substance use, navigating your own recovery from substances or behavioural addictions, or learning how to live alongside grief while maintaining an ongoing sense of connection after loss.
There is no single direction or agenda for your relationships here.
Building Safety, Clarity, and Self-Trust
Together, we work toward developing a stronger internal sense of safety, clarity, and self-trust, so you can begin responding to your life from a more grounded place.
Over time, this supports you in creating emotional boundaries that feel steadier and more sustainable, while allowing space for both love and loss to exist without losing yourself in either.
You don’t need to have the right words to begin. Sometimes, a question is enough.
You might find yourself somewhere in these questions:
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Sometimes, losing yourself happens gradually through adapting, accommodating, or trying to keep the peace. Over time, your needs, boundaries, and sense of self can become less clear. This doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It often reflects the impact of being in a relationship that feels emotionally demanding, unpredictable, or unsafe.
Read more: Losing Yourself in a Relationship: Signs of Narcissistic Abuse and Emotional Harm
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A healthy boundary isn’t about controlling the other person, it’s about staying connected to yourself. It can look like recognizing your limits, responding with greater intention instead of reactivity, and making choices that support your emotional wellbeing, even when the relationship is important to you.
Read more: Healthy Boundaries in Complex Relationships: When “Just Set a Boundary” Doesn’t Work
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It’s possible to stay in a relationship that matters to you without losing yourself in the process. This often involves developing steadier, self-honouring boundaries that support your emotional wellbeing, even when things feel complicated or uncertain.
Read more: Staying Without Losing Yourself: Boundaries in Complex Relationships
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Loving someone facing substance use, behavioural addictions, or mental health challenges can feel emotionally exhausting and deeply confusing. You may feel pulled between care, concern, hope, fear, and the impact their behaviour is having on your own wellbeing. Learning how to stay grounded while maintaining your own limits becomes an important part of navigating these relationships.
Read more: Loving Someone with Addiction: How to Support Without Losing Yourself
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Addiction is often far more layered than simply “making bad choices.” Substance use or behavioural addictions can become ways of coping with emotional pain, stress, trauma, shame, loneliness, or feeling disconnected from yourself.
Counselling offers a space to begin understanding what may be underneath the patterns, without judgment or pressure. Recovery is not just about stopping a behaviour, it’s also about rebuilding your relationship with yourself because the opposite of addiction is connection.
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You may have learned, over time, to stay highly aware of other people’s feelings as a way of maintaining connection, preventing conflict, or creating a sense of safety. While this can make you deeply attuned to others, it can also leave you carrying emotional responsibility that was never truly yours.
Read more: Emotional Responsibility and Hypervigilance in Difficult Relationships
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Codependency is often described in ways that feel limiting or oversimplified. Many people who relate to these patterns have developed strong relational awareness as a way of adapting to emotionally unpredictable environments. Understanding these patterns with more compassion and nuance can often feel more helpful than labels alone.
Read more: Codependency Revisited: When It’s Not About Weakness, But Adaptation
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Some forms of grief don’t resolve or fade in the way people expect. Instead, they become something you learn to carry over time. Finding ways to hold that grief while continuing to live your life is a deeply personal and ongoing process.
For many, this also means becoming more aware of where their grief feels understood, and where it doesn’t, especially when others struggle to respond in ways that feel supportive. This is often where Boundaried Grief begins to take shape.
Read more: Boundaried Grief: Living with Loss Without Losing Yourself
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Grief after the loss of a spouse, child, or loved one due to complications from substance use can feel especially isolating. Alongside the loss itself, there is often a quiet layer of stigma where it may feel as though others are judging, withdrawing, or wondering what could have been done differently.
At the same time, people may struggle to sit with the reality of this kind of loss. In those moments, you may even find yourself comforting others or softening your own experience to make it easier for them to hear.
Over time, this can leave you carrying your grief more privately than you want to.
This is often where Boundaried Grief begins, learning how to honour your loss while becoming more intentional about who has the capacity to hold it with you.
Read more: Grief, Stigma, and Silence: When Others Don’t Know How to Show Up
Why Blue Onion?
Blue represents trust, calm, and steadiness, qualities I bring into every counselling session. It reflects the kind of grounded, supportive space I aim to offer, especially when life feels emotionally overwhelming, uncertain, or is impacting your overall wellbeing.
The onion represents you, the layers you have developed over time in response to relational pain, addiction in your family system, mental health challenges, chronic stress, or experiences of emotional harm.
These layers often develop as ways of coping, surviving, and trying to maintain steadiness in relationships or life experiences that feel unpredictable, consuming, or emotionally unsafe.
You may be navigating the impact of loving someone struggling with substance use, behavioural addictions, or mental health challenges. You may be grieving a loss shaped by addiction or drug poisoning, trying to make sense of estrangement, or finding yourself in relationships where narcissistic, antagonistic, or emotionally harmful patterns have slowly disconnected you from yourself.
In this work, there is no pressure to remove those layers quickly or to make decisions about your relationships before you are ready. Instead, counselling offers a space to gently understand them while reconnecting with your own inner steadiness, emotional wellbeing, and strength.
Healing is not about becoming someone different. It is about coming back to yourself, one layer at a time, in a way that feels grounded, supported, and self-directed. Over time, this deepens your connection to your own mental and emotional wellbeing.
Whether your focus is relational stress, addiction, grief, mental health, or your own patterns within relationships, I’m here to support you in reconnecting with your internal sense of safety, clarity, and self-trust.
