Evans Family Counselling & Psychotherapy

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Hamilton, ON
Evans Family Counselling & Psychotherapy

Counselling and Psychotherapy services in Hamilton ON and online in Canada. Currently accepting new clients.

Offering in-person, virtual, and nature-based therapy appointments with experienced therapists.

10/08/2026

What are you questioning about therapy these days?

This conversation is mostly aimed at therapists, but I’d really like to hear from clients, too. You experience our profession from the other side of the relationship, and that perspective matters.

And yes: nuance, nuance, nuance. This isn’t a declaration that therapy is bullsh*t or that therapists are terrible humans. It’s an invitation to question some of the things we’ve become so accustomed to that we don’t always stop and examine them.

What would you add?

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A little personal context for this post: Lately, I’ve been finding it surprisingly hard to find other therapists in my community who want to talk - really talk - about what’s happening in the world and how it is showing up in our therapy rooms every single day. So I started wondering: why aren’t we talking about it more? This is your invitation to start the conversation with me.

10/05/2026

I don’t actually want to spend the next three months regulating myself into oblivion. I want to be able to feel my f*cking life.

This is my cranky, slightly irreverent way of pushing back on something I’m seeing more and more in therapy: People are starting to come in expecting to leave as a perfect, regulated human. Calm, boundaried, self-aware, never triggered, excellent emotional regulation, no inconvenient feelings.

That messes with me a little.

That said: trauma is real. And for people who have experienced trauma, nervous systems can absolutely learn to respond to present-day situations as though we’re still dealing with something from the past. Responses can be intense, disproportionate, exhausting and sometimes really hard to live with. That deserves care.

But I don’t think the answer is another hack, another 10-step morning routine, or another person on the internet telling you that if you just breathe correctly, stimulate your vagus nerve and do more yoga, you’ll finally be regulated.

Sometimes what we need is safety, connection, support, and therapy. A relationship where we don’t have to perform wellness. And the opportunity to understand what our reactions are actually trying to tell us. And sometimes the thing that needs changing isn’t your nervous system - it’s your life.

So no, I’m not anti-regulation. I’m anti-turning regulation into another achievement. The goal isn’t to become so exquisitely regulated that nothing gets to you. The goal is to have enough capacity to be with what life brings - including the anger, grief, joy, fear, ridiculousness and occasional spectacular mess of being human.

And yes, I know I said “f*cking” a lot in this post. You’re welcome.

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Disclaimer: This is a cranky Instagram post, not therapy. If trauma responses are making your life difficult, please don’t take an Instagram carousel as a substitute for actual support. Reach out by clicking the 🔗 in bio or visiting www.evanscounselling.ca

09/30/2026

Today is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. A day to remember the Indigenous children who were taken from their families, the Survivors, and the ongoing impacts of Canada’s residential school system.

And, for those of us who benefit from the systems created through colonization, a day to look honestly at what we inherited.

I’m a Gen X woman who grew up during a time when we learned very little about the Indigenous peoples of this land. The history I was taught was overwhelmingly Eurocentric and whitewashed. I feel some discomfort about that now. Not because I should somehow have known what I was never taught, but because I’m old enough to understand that what we aren’t taught shapes us too.

The older I get, the more I find myself questioning the worldview I inherited: independence as virtue, productivity as worth, individualism as strength, nature as something separate from us, suffering as an individual problem.

And after losing both of my parents and moving through some pretty heavy years, I find myself thinking more and more about spirit. And connection. About what got lost when I became so disconnected from that part of myself, and how I might find my way back.

I’m increasingly drawn to Indigenous writers and teachers whose work challenges some of the assumptions I’ve carried about what it means to be human, and our relationship with land, community and the living world.

I don’t pretend to have figured any of this out. But I do think there is something important in being willing to ask harder questions about the worldview we inherited and what we are willing to unlearn.

Today seems like a good day to keep asking.

09/28/2026

Apparently therapy is now supposed to make you perfectly regulated, endlessly self-aware and generally excellent at being a human.

Cool.

Also: no, you’re not going to lie down on our couch and tell us about your mother.

Heather, Amy and I have been talking about some of the ideas people bring into therapy - what therapy is supposed to look like, what a therapist is supposed to do, and what “getting better” is even supposed to mean. Because there is a lot of weirdness out there about therapy.

If you’re thinking about starting therapy, here are a few things we wish more people knew.

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Therapy that gets to the heart of what matters. Click the 🔗 in bio or visit www.evanscounselling.ca to learn more or book an appointment.

09/22/2026

We talk about regulation like it means being calm, grounded and unbothered. But that’s not what a regulated nervous system looks like.

A regulated nervous system can look like:

1. Feeling big emotions without being completely hijacked by them. You can be angry, anxious, overwhelmed or afraid and still have some capacity to notice what’s happening and choose what you do next.

2. Noticing when you’re reaching your limit. Regulation includes recognizing when you’ve had enough and responding to that information instead of pushing yourself past the point of capacity.

3. Staying connected to yourself while staying connected to other people. You don’t have to manage everything on your own. Connection, support and being with someone who can stay present with you can be part of regulation too.

4. Moving between activation and rest. A healthy nervous system isn’t stuck in “calm.” We need activation. We need rest. We need to be able to move between different states as life asks different things of us.

5. Coming back after you’ve been overwhelmed. You will get dysregulated. Everyone does. Regulation isn’t about never leaving your window of tolerance. It’s about developing the capacity to find your way back.

I wrote a whole blog about this because I think we’ve gotten a little carried away with the nervous-system conversation. I talk about what your nervous system actually is, how it works, what the window of tolerance has to do with all of this, what trauma can teach the nervous system - and why our obsession with regulation might have more to do with our culture’s obsession with optimization than we realize.

Read “Your Nervous System Is Not a Wellness Project” at www.evanscounselling.ca/blog or click the 🔗 in bio.

09/21/2026

The longer I do this work, the more I see how deeply we’re living in a culture of neglect.

We learn to neglect our bodies, our emotions, our needs, our relationships, our communities - and even the parts of ourselves that can’t be optimized. We’re taught that more stuff, more achievement, more productivity and more independence will make us feel okay.

And then women show up in my office wondering why they’re exhausted, resentful, anxious, disconnected from their feelings, struggling to trust themselves, or carrying everyone else’s emotional load.

I’ve had to recognize some of this in myself, too.

And what worries me is that therapy can sometimes recreate the same disconnection: teaching us how to regulate, cope and function better without always asking what we’re being asked to cope with, or what we’ve had to neglect to keep functioning.

Maybe the work isn’t just learning to manage ourselves better.

Maybe it’s learning to come back to ourselves.

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Therapy that gets to the heart of what matters. Click the 🔗 in bio or visit www.evanscounselling.ca to learn more or book an appointment.

09/18/2026

My spiritual practice is evolving ✨

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This is your reminder that Instagram isn’t therapy, and I’m (probably) not your therapist. Sometimes a little salty humour is exactly what gets us through the day.

Address

1685 Main Street West
Hamilton, ON
L8S1G5

Website

http://www.evanscounselling.ca/

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