Corey Skrypnek
MC, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying)
Who I Support
What I Help With
Adults
Couples
Adult families
Adults with ADHD and Autism
ADHD and Autism: exploration, acceptance, and accommodation
Burnout
Emotional Regulation
Relationship Conflict and Repair
Perfectionism and Shame
Anxiety and Depression
Self-esteem and Self-worth
Stress Management
Life Transitions
Coping Skills and Resilience
Corey supports clients across Canada. In-person availability in Calgary beginning at the end of October.
Many of the people I work with are the one everyone counts on. You say yes to everything then find yourself overloaded, you smooth things over and keep the peace despite the cost to yourself, or you tend other people's needs while ignoring your own. Others learned to maintain a safe distance. You've gotten so good at handling things on your own that asking for help barely occurs to you anymore. Not because you don't need it, but because somewhere along the way, asking for help stopped feeling safe.
I also have a passion for working with late diagnosed/self-identified neurodivergent adults. I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was in my forties, after raising three, also late-diagnosed, children to adulthood, with my husband of 25 years. Finally having language for what you and everyone around you missed, and wondering how different things could have been if you’d had the information sooner, can be an overwhelming experience. Many of us are thrown onto a rollercoaster of grief and rage before finding any level of acceptance. I definitely don’t have all the answers, especially because each person's experience is so very unique, which means I approach this work with curiosity, humility, and a genuine commitment to supporting you in gaining self-awareness and self-compassion. I am not sitting across from you as someone who has arrived, but as someone whose been through a lot of the hard parts of this journey and is hoping to join you on yours.
I work with adults, couples, and adult families. My work is grounded in emotionally-focused therapy (EFT), which means we spend time with the emotional experiences and relational cycles underneath whatever brought you in, not just the behaviour on the surface of it. I hold a trauma-informed lens throughout, so you set the pace, and safety comes before insight, never the other way around. I don't treat your emotions as problems to manage or symptoms to reduce. They're information, and part of our work is actually listening to understand what they're trying to tell you about who you were made to believe you are, and the strategies you learned early to stay loved, safe, valued, or just to survive.
A Typical Session May Look Like
You don't need to come into sessions with all the answers, or even a topic, and most people are surprised by how quickly the pressure to have the right words disappears.
In our sessions, you can expect:
Warmth and genuine empathy
Honesty and authenticity, which means profanity when the moment demands it
Curiosity that offers reframing to challenge old narratives
Emotional depth without pressure to go faster than feels right
Space to be fully yourself, the good, the hard, and the complicated, because it is all just being human
Support that helps you build deeper self-trust that you can cope, adapt, and begin to thrive with all that life brings
There is no homework here, but I will invite you to notice things, try things, and practice being present in your own life between sessions, rather than living in the future or managing everyone else.
Specialties
Neurodivergence, especially late-diagnosis: I work with clients who were diagnosed or self-identified as having autism or ADHD later in life. While this information can bring relief of knowing you are actually a zebra instead of the horse you tried to be for so long, it can also bring overwhelming anger and grief that so many people missed it or ignored it while you were struggling so hard to just survive. Now, you may be experiencing an exhaustion underneath everything that weighs you down no matter how much rest you get. This is the cost of years spent masking and overperforming to keep up appearances until your body finally starts telling you it can't keep up anymore.
Relationship counselling: Maybe you and your partner keep having the same fight, over and over, no matter how it starts, and the distance between you gets deeper and more painful every time. Or the disconnection may be between you and your adult child, or your parent, where the conversation keeps ending in heavy silence, no matter how carefully you choose your words or your actions. Sometimes the relationship that's struggling most is the one with yourself, where you keep saying yes past your own capacity, where your needs are so rarely considered that you've lost track of what they even are.
Estrangement or distance between parents and adult children
Burnout and perfectionism
People-pleasing and codependence
Therapeutic Approaches
Person-centred therapy: You've likely spent a long time being the one who reads the room, who adjusts, who has the right answer ready before anyone asks for it. That job is off the table here. I'm not working off a checklist of what's wrong with you. You are the expert in your life, and given the right space with safety, genuine care, and empathy, you will absolutely move toward the life you want.
Emotionally-focused therapy (EFT): Most of the fights that keep happening, whether it's with a partner or a parent or a grown child you've drifted from, usually aren't really about the dishes or the phone call that didn't come. EFT looks underneath the argument to the fear or the longing driving it. One person pushes because being left terrifies them. The other goes quiet because closeness has never felt safe. Once the cycle is visible, it stops being about who's right and starts being something we can actually work with.
Attachment-based counselling: The ways you learned to stay close to people, or protect yourself when closeness wasn't reliable, made sense once. It might not be serving you now, in a marriage, with your adult children, or with friends you keep at arm's length, just in case. We look at where those early strategies came from and explore new ways to deepen or clarify the relationships you're in today.
Trauma-informed counselling: This approach means that every part of the work, from the pace to the questions asked, and how much control you have over the process, is shaped around safety and choice rather than some manualized process.
Neurodivergent-affirming therapy: I reject the idea that neurodivergent brains, autistic, ADHD, or otherwise, are a broken version of a neurotypical one. They have a different way of processing, moving through, and experiencing the world. In practice, that means not treating traits like stimming, special interests, sensory needs, or a different relationship to eye contact or small talk as things to mask or eliminate. It is recognizing that anxiety, burnout, or relationship strain in late-diagnosed adults isn't a separate problem disconnected from their neurodivergence. It's what happens when someone has spent decades adapting to a world that persistently tries to shame them into performing “normal” more convincingly. Affirming means support that helps neurodivergent people accept and understand how they actually work, and build a life and relationships that accommodate rather than fight it.
We Might Be A Good Fit If
You want to a therapist that is also neurodivergent
You value working with someone who has a lot of life experience, and they understand none of us know it all and we are all doing our best
You appreciate authenticity, consistency, and genuine curiosity
You need a therapist who looks at the whole picture, your history, your relationships, and the systems you're navigating because they all play a role in the challenges we work with
You need a space where you don't have to perform or mask, where all of you is welcome
You are open to new ways to look at things and want someone who will tentatively offer reframes that don't disregard your experience but open possibilities around it
You want to understand why the same fights or outcomes keep happening, not just collect more strategies to “fix” you
Trainings & Certifications
ICCEFT Externship for Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy
Relational Neuroscience of Attachment
ICCEFT Fundamentals of Emotionally Focused Therapy