Why work with Inner Core Psychotherapy?
A burden feels lighter when it is carried together.
At Inner Core Psychotherapy in Ottawa, we believe we face life's challenges best together. We walk alongside you through life's difficulties, helping you navigate transitions and find healing along the way.
The name "Inner Core" reflects our belief that beneath protective patterns and difficult experiences lies a deeper sense of self, with the capacity for strength, compassion, and healing. Therapy offers a safe space to explore what may be keeping you stuck, understand how you have learned to cope, and reconnect with yourself with greater compassion.
Our registered psychotherapists are committed to human-centred care; we combine evidence-based approaches with a genuine desire to understand you as a person, not just a set of symptoms. We let your voice guide the process. As humans, we need balance: moments of laughter and tears, the ups and downs. We embrace it all. We're not just therapists; we're partners in your healing journey.
Inner Core Psychotherapy can help you move forward with greater clarity, confidence, and resilience.
Our Multilingual Therapy Services
Therapy in English, French and Spanish, so you can express yourself in the language that feels most comfortable
Mary Jane offers therapy in English and French, and Amarylis offers therapy in Spanish, French and English, so you can express yourself in the language that feels most comfortable.
Our experiences living in different countries and speaking multiple languages enrich our understanding of culture, identity and belonging. Alongside our education, these lived experiences provide perspectives that extend beyond textbooks.
At Inner Core Psychotherapy, we approach your story with curiosity and respect, recognizing your experiences, values and what matters most to you.
The Heart of our Approach
Compassion
Connection
Evidence-Based Care
How We Work With You
Our Approach
1. Understand Your Journey
We begin by exploring where you are today and the experiences that have shaped you. This helps us understand your story and identify what you hope to achieve in therapy.
2. Chart Your Course
Together, we'll create a clear, personalized plan that aligns with your goals. This plan will guide our work and ensure that each step we take is tailored to your unique needs.
3. Navigate The Path
With continuous support and evidence-based approaches, we’ll work together to help you overcome challenges, build resilience, and move forward with confidence toward the changes you desire.
What Is Therapy? Benefits of Therapy for Your Mental Health
Therapy is a safe, confidential space where you can explore your thoughts and emotions, understand patterns in your life, develop healthier coping strategies, and create meaningful change. Watch the TED Talk below to learn how therapy works, why people seek therapy, and how it can support your mental health and overall well-being.
Approaches We Use In Therapy
At Inner Core Psychotherapy, we go beyond the clinical model to offer a human-centred experience. While our therapists in Ottawa are highly educated, we don't rely solely on textbooks and techniques. Instead, we listen actively, build trust, and ensure your voice guides the process. We balance serious work with the lightness of laughter, knowing healing comes from both effort and joy. We blend compassion with evidence-based methods to ensure therapy is effective, impactful, and aligned with your personal journey.
Our therapists practice Somatic Experiencing (SE) and are Somatic Experiencing Practitioners (SEPs). SE helps you gently notice physical sensations and how stress and trauma are held in the body and nervous system. By building awareness, regulation, and safety, SE helps you feel more grounded, connected, and resilient.
We use Internal Family Systems (IFS) to explore different aspects of your experience—such as fear, shutting down, or self-criticism—with curiosity and compassion. Rather than viewing these responses as personal failings, we explore how they may have developed as protective parts. By identifying and healing these wounded parts, we help you move toward a more balanced and integrated sense of self.
Our therapists practice Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which focuses on identifying and addressing the emotions that drive your behaviours in therapy sessions and helps you build healthier, more secure connections with others. It's especially effective in improving emotional regulation and interpersonal relationships.
Our approach draws on Sue Johnson's Attachment-Based Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which helps you recognize your emotional needs and the patterns that shape your connections with others. Together, we explore how past relationship experiences shape how you seek closeness, respond to conflict, and protect yourself from emotional pain. supporting stronger bonds and greater emotional security. This process is designed to foster stronger bonds and enhance your emotional security.
the Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) model, a trauma-informed parts model that integrates principles and techniques from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, clinical hypnosis, and cognitive restructuring. It offers a clear, practical, and neurobiologically grounded path to healing. By reframing extreme behaviours and inner fragmentation as protective responses to trauma, it combats shame and self-loathing, and it changes the client's relationship to the symptoms.
TIST helps clients recognize their symptoms as adaptive responses to trauma held by fragmented parts—and teaches them to relate to those parts with compassion, rather than fear or shame. This therapeutic approach supports emotional and physical healing, offering techniques to help you stabilize and manage overwhelming feelings.
We draw on mindfulness practices informed by Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to help you notice your thoughts, feelings and body sensations with greater awareness and less judgment. Together, we explore practices that feel comfortable for you, supporting your ability to manage stress and respond to difficult emotions with greater choice and self-compassion.
We use Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to help you explore how thoughts, emotions, and behaviours influence one another. Together, we identify patterns that may contribute to distress, consider more balanced perspectives and develop practical coping skills to support your emotional well-being and goals.
Our approach draws on Kenneth Pargament's Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy, offering space to explore faith, spirituality, values and questions of meaning. We welcome conversations about what brings comfort and connection, as well as beliefs or experiences that feel distressing, conflicting or no longer supportive. This approach includes religious, spiritual, agnostic and atheist perspectives. We follow your lead, respecting your worldview without promoting a particular belief system.
We draw on Family Systems Therapy to help you understand how family relationships, roles and patterns shape how you feel and connect with others. Together, we explore how these patterns develop, including across generations, and how they may contribute to tension or distance. We work collaboratively to support clearer communication, healthier boundaries and more thoughtful responses to one another, helping you build stronger connections while making space for each person's needs.
We draw on the Gottman Method to help couples understand patterns that create conflict or distance. Together, we use research-based tools to strengthen communication, navigate disagreements with greater care and deepen friendship and emotional connection. We work collaboratively to help you understand each other's needs and build a more supportive, meaningful partnership.
We draw on Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) to help you recognize your strengths, notice what is already working and clarify what you would like to change. Together, we explore times when difficulties feel more manageable and identify small, practical steps toward your goals, building on your existing skills and resources.
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