Kyla Margulies

My goal, first and foremost, is that you feel understood, seen, and accepted for who you are, and sure that I want what’s best for you. While you came to therapy to make some changes, at this point I am a stranger, so I take a gentle approach as I work to earn your trust. This doesn’t mean that I will always agree with you, but it does mean that I will share my thoughts with honesty, compassion, and curiosity to know more while respecting your boundaries. Our work starts with getting to know you, who you are, what is happening (or not) in your life that you want to change, and the impact these experiences have on your wellbeing, relationships, and security. I want to understand how you became the person you are today. So, we’ll talk about your current experiences, your early experiences, and everything in between (okay, not everything!), explore the impact of the things you’ve been through, and discuss how & what you’ve learned about yourself, the world, and your place in it. We’ll collaborate on your therapy goals and options for how we can work towards them. We’ll track our progress, discuss what feels helpful, what doesn’t, and we’ll recalibrate as necessary. I’ll ask thoughtful questions that invite deeper self-reflection and offer perspective. I’ll listen to what you say, what you don’t say, what your body language says for you, and share what I understand about your strengths, your blind spots, and what’s keeping you stuck. If you’re open to it, we might spend time listening to what your body knows that your mind hasn’t yet pieced together, which can give us more information to work with and inform new ways out of old, unhelpful patterns. Throughout our work I’ll help you make sense of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, and relationship strategies, offer suggestions and guidance about the direction of our work, share science, research, and resources relevant to your goals, and support you in expanding your comfort zone and practicing new skills to improve your relationship with yourself and others.

• Couples Counselling: Couples counselling can help couples who are feeling disconnected, stuck in unhelpful cycles, experiencing sex & intimacy challenges, longing for more meaningful connection, struggling with communication and understanding, navigating complicated family dynamics, or reeling from a betrayal or broken trust. • Sex & intimacy issues: Sex & intimacy work can address issues like performance anxiety, desire & arousal challenges, pain with arousal and/or sex, difficulty staying present during sexual intimacy, challenges with sexual communication or initiating sexual intimacy, navigating desire discrepancies in relationships, and more. • Non-monogamy: I support folks who are currently non-monogamous and folks who are curious about or ready to start practicing non-monogamy. This work can explore non-monogamy as an identity, relationship structure, or lifestyle and in the context of individual or couples counselling. Exploring non-monogamy in therapy doesn’t mean you have to, or even want to, do it.

• Hakomi is a mindfulness-based somatic therapy that focuses on your experiences and how they shape you, rather than on analyzing interactions or changing your thoughts. Through mindful awareness of body sensations, emotions, and memories, Hakomi helps you access and integrate information from both your mind and body to make sense of your experiences and create more flexibility in your responses. Clients who choose this approach often express gaining a deeper acceptance for and understanding of themselves, more agency in their lives, and meaningful change that feels subtle, but real. • Sex Therapy work can be done in individual counselling or couples counselling and often explores sexual experiences, beliefs, and expectations to reimagine and practice a new sexual relationship (with yourself or with another) that is more satisfying, less pressured, and more intentional. Sex & intimacy challenges can occur in happy, healthy relationships, or they can by a symptom of underlying relationship issues. An important part of this work is identifying which scenario we are working with and ensuring a foundation of emotional safety and effective communication before shifting the focus to the sex. • Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) focuses on understanding and changing the patterns that shape your interactions with others and your relationship with yourself. Rather than getting caught up in the details of what happened, EFT focuses on how things happen - the underlying experiences and emotional processes that shape how you interpret the words and actions of others, the ways you’ve learned to seek connection and protect yourself, and how these processes impact your relationship dynamics. By bringing awareness to the needs, fears, and longings that are often disguised as criticism, complaints, withdrawal, or shutdown, EFT offers new ways of expressing yourself to foster greater connection, understanding, and emotional security. • Attachment Based Approaches are informed by what it means to be human. They acknowledge that we are socially bonding mammals, born helpless and dependent on the attention and care of others, whose survival as a species required group acceptance and protection, with large brains that evolved to prioritize staying alive over being happy, and a nervous system designed to detect and react to potential threats quicker than our big brains can think. All together, this means that our formative attachment experiences shape the frameworks through which we interpret the actions of others, experience closeness and separation, and protect against (real or perceived) threats. This seems like a good thing until we remember that these frameworks are predicated on a relationship dynamic of relative dependence and powerlessness that no longer exists.

• You are craving a deeper understanding of and acceptance for yourself • You know you love your partner but you’re struggling to feel heard, appreciated, or important in your relationship • You are looking for therapy that is both gentle and honest to help you see your blind spots with compassion • You are curious about opening up your relationship and/or exploring what non-monogamy means to you • You find yourself monitoring and anticipating the emotions of others and making decisions based on what will keep the peace • You are looking for therapy that balances deeper emotional exploration & processing with practical strategies for doing things differently • You are in a straight presenting relationship but find yourself wondering about or wanting to explore your sexuality in a new way • You are stuck in your relationship – one of you feels dismissed, the other feels attacked, and both of you feel frustrated, exhausted, and alone • You appreciate a therapist who can integrate philosophical, systemic, and scientific concepts to help contextualize your experiences and challenges • You have a strong connection to your body and want therapy that welcomes the wisdom that it holds, or you want to learn how to better listen to what your body is trying to tell you • You grew up as a parentified child and now struggle to identify what you feel and want or you’re unsure if those feelings and wants are even valid • You want a therapist who knows when it’s time to sit with the heavy stuff, when it’s time to bring some lightness and levity, and how to help you do that • You feel like you’ve been living on autopilot in a life you didn’t really choose and are ready to get honest about what you want and take back the wheel • You want to want to be having more sex in your long-term relationship but struggling to understand why you don’t

• Certified Hakomi Therapist • Comprehensive Training in Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy • Hakomi Advanced Professional Skills Training • Gottman Level 1 & 2 • Emotionally Focused Therapy: Attachment Science in Practice • Integrating Sex and Couples Therapy • Mindfulness-Centered Couples Therapy • The Sexually Competent Therapist • Polyamory in Therapy • Becoming and Anti-Racist & Anti-Oppressive Clinician • Foundations of Somatic Therapy & Trauma Healing • Trauma-Based Nightmare Treatment • TEAM-CBT • Various Ethics & Documentation Trainings • Clinical Supervision Level 1