Janelle Drisner, R. Psych.

I am a White, cisgender, Canadian-born woman of Northern European descent, located in Edmonton, Alberta. I am a Registered Psychologist with a private practice, and a co-owner of and instructor with the Canadian Institute of Existential Analysis and Logotherapy. I’ve been providing counselling for the past 11 years, specializing in existential and meaning-centered psychotherapy and astrological counselling. My approach to therapy is trauma-informed, body-centred, spiritually-integrated, and ecologically-rooted. I hold, with ease and with tension, that psychotherapy is both a science-led clinical treatment under the domain of health care (mental health), as well as a healing tradition that artfully bridges body, mind, and soul (psyche). As such, I am deeply grateful that one of my clients introduced me to Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall’s teaching of Two-Eyed seeing. Dipping my toes into this understanding has felt profoundly resonant with the way I aim to approach my work as a psychotherapist and teacher. I’ve been trained as a psychotherapist in classically Western approaches to knowing: learning and practicing evidence-based psychotherapeutic modalities, conducting research, participating in academia and scholarship (which has been largely anglocentric and colonial). And yet, much of my practice has arisen from learning and steeping myself in spiritual and ecological wisdom and teachings of diverse and ancient traditions. I aim to approach my work with clients and students with “two eyes”, holding multiple ways of knowing, seeing, feeling, and attuning. This allows me to meet people where they are, attune to the work that is ready, and invite synchronous experiences and insights to unfold. My view is that therapy is an alchemical laboratory, and that the therapeutic relationship with my clients serves as a vessel for transformative work. My task is to approach my work with humility, curiosity, and balance so that my clients’ psyches can facilitate their own innate healing process.