“A true healer does not heal you. She simply reflects back to you, your own capacity to heal. She is a reflector. A loving mirror”
— Jeff Foster
ALYCIA CEBALLOS
Founder / Therapist MAMFT, RCC
I am a therapist, mother of two young boys, wife, friend, sister, daughter, and so much more. I love seeing people grow and heal, experience restorative relationships with their emotions and bodies, and come to trust their innate internal wisdom again. I have a passion for complex/relational trauma recovery and for empowering parents and children to have the best and most effective relationship they can to encourage great emotional health. This may take the forms of parent consultations, child therapy, family therapy, and individual counselling with parents to work on personal triggers.
I strive to create relationships with my clients built on safety, collaboration, trust, and hope. As the therapist, I feel honoured to be able to join another in their suffering, undoing aloneness, and moving towards freedom, transformation, and wholeness. I view "problem behaviours" not as pathology but as actually normal ways our brains and bodies have learned to cope or survive various experiences of suffering. Therefore, ALL parts of you are welcome with me and we will get to know these parts together in order to help them find new ways of being.
My therapeutic approach is primarily experiential. This means that I approach therapy using a bottom-up healing process, where clients first notice and experience new or previously ignored bodily sensations and emotions (bottom), then bring those to awareness and create new insights (up). This allows clients to not simply walk away with skills to use at home, but to actually have a different or new experience with themselves, full of joy and acceptance, that extends from inside therapy to their external world. This is effective because our brain reacts and stores memories based on our threat response, emotions, and felt connection in a different part of our brain (bottom-brain) than the one used for logic and insight (top-brain).
I also draw on expressive therapies, such as art therapy, sand tray therapy, and movement. Humans experience the world in images from the time they are born. Memories, especially ones from childhood or ones holding big emotions, are also stored as images. Simply talking is not always helpful or possible at times as a result. Therefore utilizing these other means of expression and processing can be effective. This again allows a bottom-up healing process as described above.
Finally, I am originally trained as a systemic therapist, which means that I consider the fact that people live in community with others, not just as isolated individuals. Living in these social systems (family, work, school) is what can be a source of stress at times, but also an amazing and beautiful resource for growth. Therefore, my work with you might also involve support and advocacy within your own social network.
I am a Registered Clinical Counsellor in good standing with the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counsellors (BCACC) with a Masters Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy from Trinity Western University. I am skilled at using a variety of approaches including AEDP, IFS and parts work, trauma and body-based therapies, parent-child attachment work, inner child work, emotion-focused therapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy, Satir Transformational Systemic Therapy, and expressive therapies (art, sandtray, play, and movement). The approaches I pull from depend on the individual needs and strengths of my clients. However, all of my work is aimed at de-pathologizing and empowering clients to trust their internal wisdom. If you have any questions about approaches you do not see listed, feel free to ask.
