Welcome

Finding the right therapist is an important decision. A complimentary 20-minute consultation provides an opportunity to discuss your concerns, ask questions, explore treatment options, and determine whether my approach is a good fit for your needs. There is no obligation and no pressure—simply an opportunity to connect and consider your next steps.

When life feels uncertain, knowing where to start can be difficult. Reaching out is often the first step. Together, we can develop a personalized plan that helps you move from surviving toward healing, growth, and recovery.

As a client-centred psychodynamic therapist, I believe that healing begins with understanding. Together, we will explore the experiences, patterns, and relationships that have shaped your life, fostering self-awareness, curiosity, and insight as you move toward greater wellness and a more authentic connection with yourself.

This virtual women’s recovery group meets Monday mornings from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. For more than 14 years, women pursuing abstinence and recovery have come together to explore the challenges, relationships, emotions, and life experiences that influence recovery. Through connection, support, and honest reflection, members work toward greater self-awareness, resilience, and lasting change.

From Survival to Recovery: Understanding the Intersection of Mental Health, Trauma, and Addiction

This workshop explores the complex and often misunderstood relationship between mental health, trauma, and addiction. Moving beyond symptom-based explanations, participants will examine how many of the thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and coping strategies commonly associated with mental health concerns and addiction may have originated as adaptive survival responses to overwhelming life experiences.

Through a trauma-informed lens, we will explore how chronic stress, adverse childhood experiences, attachment disruptions, loss, shame, grief, and relational wounds can shape the development of both mental health struggles and addictive behaviours. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which curiosity becomes diminished, emotional and cognitive flexibility narrows, and individuals become increasingly hyper-focused on safety, control, avoidance, and survival.

The workshop examines how isolation, while often experienced as protection from further harm, can become a powerful maintaining factor in both trauma and addiction. What once functioned as a means of safety may ultimately reinforce disconnection, loneliness, emotional suffering, and dependence on maladaptive coping strategies. Participants will explore how survival adaptations that once protected an individual can later contribute to difficulties with emotional regulation, relationships, self-concept, and recovery.

Topics explored include attachment, shame, grief, emotional regulation, survival strategies, trauma responses, addiction, and the relationship between humiliation, humility, and the recovery process. Participants will be encouraged to consider addiction not simply as a disorder to be treated, but as a continuation of survival strategies that may have once served an important purpose.

In addition to exploring the theoretical and clinical intersections of trauma, mental health, and addiction, participants will be provided with practical clinical tools, therapeutic concepts, and intervention strategies that can be integrated into their work. Emphasis will be placed on developing a trauma-informed understanding of presenting problems, identifying survival-based adaptations, fostering curiosity and self-reflection, and supporting movement from isolation and shame toward connection, recovery, and growth.

Designed to bridge theory and practice, this workshop offers participants both a conceptual framework and practical approaches that can be applied in clinical, recovery, educational, and helping relationships.

Drawing from more than 35 years of experience in mental health and addictions, Polly Florius invites participants to view recovery not simply as symptom reduction or abstinence, but as a process of reconnection, self-discovery, resilience, and movement from survival toward healing and the actualization of self.

Love Addiction

Explore how unmet emotional and attachment needs can lead to an intense focus on romantic relationships for validation, security, and self-worth. Drawing on the work of Pia Mellody, this group examines the roots of love addiction and the journey toward healthier, more balanced relationships.

Codependence

Explore patterns of people-pleasing, caretaking, boundary difficulties, and over-responsibility for others. Based on Pia Mellody’s developmental model, this group examines how codependent behaviours develop and how recovery can foster healthier boundaries, self-esteem, and emotional autonomy.

Many clients enter therapy believing they cannot heal because they cannot forgive.

They have absorbed the message—culturally and spiritually—that forgiveness is the benchmark of healing and the inability to extend this means they have somehow failed to “do the work.”

Yet one clinical concern is that forgiveness, when encouraged prematurely, may function less as healing and more as emotional bypassing—pressuring individuals to transcend pain before it has been fully processed, validated, or integrated.

Part of our role as clinicians may be to help clients reconsider what healing requires—not as extending grace, absolution, or blessing toward the person who caused harm, but as the gradual process of letting go: loosening fixation on the wound, relinquishing the emotional grip of past injury, and ultimately finding freedom from resentment.

Within Christian thought, forgiveness has traditionally been understood as a spiritual and moral act involving mercy toward the offender and release of their debt.

But in the therapeutic space, clients may benefit from understanding that healing does not necessarily require this form of pardon. Sometimes it requires only the inward work of release. 

Many would argue that the intrapsychic work required to surrender bitterness and transcend suffering is itself spiritual—that the journey inward toward healing is, in many respects, soul work.

And for some, that shift in language may be exactly what allows the healing process to begin.

Addiction may initially feel like relief from responsibility, accountability, pain, shame, or emotional conflict.

But over time, the very thing perceived as protection often becomes the deepest abandonment of self.

In the world of trauma and addiction, this is part of the tragedy. The attempt to escape suffering may slowly sever individuals from their own needs, values, emotions, relationships, and identity.

Recovery is not simply stopping a substance or behaviour. It is often the painful process of reconnecting with self again.

uriosity may be one of the greatest casualties of both trauma and addiction. 

Trauma narrows curiosity into survival: scanning, predicting, anticipating, protecting. Addiction then narrows it even further. Addiction can eventually become experienced not simply as relief, but as an escape from the burden of being psychologically present at all.

The curiosity required for evolution, exploration, expansion, and discovery becomes muted. The trauma brain stays organized around safety while the addict brain remains organized around the perceived solution.  Both ultimately deepen isolation.

Our role, while many, may be less about installing certainty and more about helping provide a safe enough setting for curiosity to slowly begin returning.

Because once curiosity begins to return, so do choice, possibility, and exploration. The future is no longer experienced as already-known catastrophe, but as something that can be approached differently.

And with choice comes hope.

To explore. To question. To imagine. To tolerate the unknown without immediately experiencing it as danger.

And perhaps that process must unfold as gradually as the evolution of curiosity itself.

Without curiosity, there is no hope.

Fear doesn’t interrupt addiction.

It often reinforces it.

Fear activates the same system that addiction protects against:

shame, humiliation, self-contempt.

For many, the shame of addiction isn’t new.

It echoes something older.

A message learned early:

I am less than worthy, undeserving, unloveable. 

So when fear shows up, fear of consequences, loss, even death,

it doesn’t create change.

It deepens that message.

And in that state, guilt, which requires honesty about what I’ve done, gets buried under shame about who I am or who I have become. 

Under the humiliation of shame,

there is no separation. No space for reflection. No path to humility.

Only protection: denial, justification, collapse, or continued use.

So the question may not be:

How do we make people more afraid, more honest, or more accountable?

But rather:

What makes honesty feel so unsafe and how do we reduce the humiliation that sustains that?

Recovery doesn’t begin with fear.

It begins when someone can face what they’ve done without turning it into a verdict of who they are.

That’s humility.

And without humility, there is no ownership.

Without ownership, there is no change.

And without change, there is no recovery.

Fear doesn’t interrupt addiction.

It often reinforces it.

Fear activates the same system that addiction protects against:

shame, humiliation, self-contempt.

For many, the shame of addiction isn’t new.

It echoes something older.

A message learned early:

I am less than worthy, undeserving, unloveable. 

So when fear shows up, fear of consequences, loss, even death,

it doesn’t create change.

It deepens that message.

And in that state, guilt, which requires honesty about what I’ve done, gets buried under shame about who I am or who I have become. 

Under the humiliation of shame,

there is no separation. No space for reflection. No path to humility.

Only protection: denial, justification, collapse, or continued use.

So the question may not be:

How do we make people more afraid, more honest, or more accountable?

But rather:

What makes honesty feel so unsafe and how do we reduce the humiliation that sustains that?

Recovery doesn’t begin with fear.

It begins when someone can face what they’ve done without turning it into a verdict of who they are.

That’s humility.

And without humility, there is no ownership.

Without ownership, there is no change.

And without change, there is no recovery

What if addiction is not merely substance dependence—but an unconscious surrogate attachment in which the original external source of injury to the self is replaced by another?

Individuals raised within trauma-bonded and enmeshed family systems may be uniquely primed for addiction to assume this role.

For many, early attachment teaches that comfort may come from the same source as injury.

That what soothes may also betray.

Within such environments, the very definition of emotional regulation becomes distorted.

Relief is not learned through safety, consistency, and secure co-regulation, but through chaotic cycles of pain, reconciliation, enmeshment, and temporary comfort.

States of dysregulation are maintained through survival systems that fluctuate between hypervigilance, anticipatory anxiety, and dissociation.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that addiction can become so powerfully compelling—carrying a familiarity that feels like home.

It mirrors the relational template the nervous system was conditioned to understand: something one turns toward for relief despite knowing it causes harm.

Always available.

Momentarily soothing in its familiarity.

Never abandoning.

Yet persistently betraying.

What may appear from the outside as self-destruction may instead reflect a trauma-organized reenactment of attachment injury—an unconscious gravitation toward what feels familiar, even when destructive.

Recovery is not merely the cessation of substance use, but the painful process of grieving and dismantling the surrogate attachment that remained ever-present despite its persistent betrayal.

#trauma #addiction #attachment #recovery

Honesty is often treated as a character trait. Something people either have or they don't.

But what if honesty is actually an acquired skill?

In many trauma and addiction-impacted families, dishonesty becomes the language that is taught. Not because people are bad, but because secrecy, denial, minimization, and distortion often serve important survival functions.

Children learn this language the same way they learn English, French, or any other language. They become fluent in it.

Over time, it becomes automatic. It shapes how they think, how they relate to others, and even how they understand themselves.

Recovery is not simply about learning to tell the truth.

It is about learning an entirely new language.

And like any language, honesty is both an acquired skill and a daily practice. It must be learned, spoken, practiced, and maintained. Left unused, people often drift back toward old ways of thinking, old defenses, and old distortions.

We do not become honest because we decide to be honest once.

We become honest by repeatedly choosing reality over illusion, truth over comfort, and vulnerability over protection.

The challenge is not only learning honesty.

The challenge is unlearning the language that once made survival possible.

Eventually, honesty stops feeling like a foreign language. It becomes more fluent, more natural, and more deeply integrated into who we are.

But like any language, it requires ongoing practice.

Fluency is not achieved once and for all.

It is maintained.