We direct bill counselling to Pacific Blue Cross, GreenShield, Canada Life & Sun Life; details here.
We direct bill counselling to Pacific Blue Cross, GreenShield, Canada Life & Sun Life; details here.
PhD Candidate (She/Her)
Abby’s primary work is clinical supervision and business consulting for practitioners, as well as systems consulting and people management support for organizations and non-profits. She also works with a limited number of therapy clients by community referral. If you’re here for therapy, you’ll find more about who Abby tends to work with and how to reach out at the bottom of this page.
…you’re looking for a therapist, supervisor, or consultant who names power directly, asks a lot of questions, and supports you to build values-aligned coalitions and sustainable infrastructure through a systems lens, while using humor to stay honest without pretending things aren’t hard.
Abby works primarily with therapists, practitioners, and organizational leaders who are trying to run their practices, non-profits, and organizations without selling their soul, while navigating the ethical tension and personal cost of working inside capitalist and colonial systems they don’t fully agree with, in order to create systems of ethical, embodied sustainability. Many of the folx she works with are also carrying grief: grief about the dumpster fire that is this world, about the lives and careers that haven’t unfolded as imagined, about how to stay in relationship across difference, or about moving forward from relationships that were loving and harmful at the same time.
Sessions tend to hold seriousness and levity side by side. There’s space to be blunt, to ask questions that don’t have immediate answers, and to sort through what difference would actually make a difference. Abby often helps distill big ideas, political analysis, and clinical theory into practical next steps from a systems and organizational, infrastructural lens.
This is not therapy or supervision that avoids politics, prioritizes neutrality, or asks you to feel better at the expense of being honest.
Welcome, I’m so glad you’ve connected – you don’t have to wade through this isolating, demanding, and sometimes heartbreaking world alone. Maybe you’re grieving what you’ve envisioned for your life or the dumpster fire that is this world. Maybe you’re feeling weighted down by constantly questioning your place and where you belong. Maybe you’re working towards collective liberation and wanting support to navigate the nuances that help you stay alive in the work, in relationships of aligned coalition, and in your full humanness. Maybe you’re grieving the relational contexts you’re a part of that are both loving and harmful at the same time.
Whatever it is, this intricate interconnection between identity, purpose and grief is where I can support you. The folx I work with in therapy, supervision, and consulting with are attuned to the realities of systemic oppression and have had to navigate invalidating and minimizing environments. In working together, we can support you in embodying a rootedness in joy and groundedness in purpose, all while reconnecting with the lineage of resistance to create the world that could be.
A little about me: I’m a cisqueer, working-turned-middle class, half-gen, currently non-disabled, straight-sized settler from Hong Kong who lives with chronic pain and ADHD. I found my way to this work through exploring and navigating my own relational contexts through the lens of privilege and systemic oppression. Above all else, I love being an explorer of wonder and possibilities, witnessing and co-creating with the magic that still manages to survive this messed up world, and aspiring to be a human database and connective force for our revolutionary resistance. My ancestors come from roots in Chaozhou and Nanjing, and a lineage of creating sneaky practices to survive necropolitics, poverty, and refugeeism.
For the last decade, I’ve had the privilege of working with folx resisting multiple systems of oppression, which often manifests as being impacted by the criminal punishment system, addictions, and relational trauma (not just trauma with a capital T). Through our work, we’ve dissected the paradoxes of life, cultivating growth and healing by exploring the stories we subscribe to and the stories we tell. My approach centers on co-creating spaces of change by cultivating a culture of compassionate curiosity and discernment; often with a dose of humor and creativity (and lots of questions!). We look at your experience through an intersectional, systemic, and political context, often incorporating things like EMDR and Somatic work to further contextualize your exploration, compassion, and growth. Many of the folx I work with also incorporate their work with human design, personality type systems, and astrology into our work; nothing is off limits!
While I am continually engaging in direct clinical work with clients within a counselling context, most of my work now revolves around providing clinical supervision and business consulting from a justice-grounded perspective. Many practitioners are not supported in accessing business development education and operational support, let alone one that is in alignment with our ethics, our knowing, and the world we are trying to create. If you relate to this, my role is to support you in developing a sustainable practice and a values-aligned organization without having to sacrifice the ethics you hold dear.
I’m honoured to have worked with individual practitioners, group practices, practicum programs, non-profits, essential services, and organizations to develop new human and infrastructural systems to strengthen coalitions for an embodied practice of their values and ethics. For more information about my Clinical Supervision and Consulting Approach, please visit this page.
In addition to my work here at Venturous, I am part of the operations team at Healing in Colour; teach and supervise counsellors-in-training at various local graduate programs; and founded Reflecting on Justice, a mutual aid/wealth redistribution-based virtual platform for therapists to unlearn systemic oppression within ourselves and our profession through community with other therapists. To ensure continual alignment with ethical practice, I engage in ongoing clinical supervision with Vikki Reynolds.
I’m also currently engaged in doctoral research into how the lineages of cultural resistance informs the most foundational building blocks of what it means to be a society: What do we owe to each other? What is love and care in the context of the global majority? What does it mean to be well in a world that’s so unwell? What is possible for us at this emergence point we’re living through?
Ultimately, this work aims to contribute to a more ethical status quo in care professions by deconstructing therapeutic theory through the unwritten, lived stories of people and communities of resistance, rather than forcing those stories into narrow colonial frameworks of wellness, and thus reimagining therapy through decolonial theory, abolitionist ethics, and lineages of resistance. This research lives inside the supervision and consulting work. When practitioners work with me to figure out how to hold their ethics while building something sustainable, the questions underneath are often these same ones: what do we actually owe each other, what does care look like when the systems containing our work were never built to facilitate liberation, and what becomes possible when we stop trying to fit liberatory work into colonial containers.
Outside of work, I have a passion for creating + learning, video games, comedy + live music. I’m also a distracted puppy mama to a 1-year old pup named Stella who is already the best anti-capitalism teacher anyone could ever ask for.
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For therapy, Abby works by community referral with adults individually and through relationship counselling. She supports folx who need a therapist that won’t ask them to leave their politics at the door; folx who are oriented toward generative change and collective liberation, navigating personal grief and relational dynamics alongside the weight of the world. Sessions incorporate EMDR and somatic work, alongside intersectional, systemic, and political context.
Sessions can be directly billed to most extended health insurance providers, CVAP, ICBC, and FNHA. Abby offers virtual sessions and in-person sessions in Port Moody.
For therapy inquiries, reach out directly through email or our contact form. Both the email and contact form goes to a private email directly to Abby.
All the counsellors at Venturous hold the same anti-oppressive politics in the work and are regularly in clinical supervision with Abby and as a group for accountability. Not sure which Venturous counsellor is the right fit? Take our 3-minute quiz or book a free consult with any of our counsellors.
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