I’m a clinical counsellor who is comfortable with complexity. You do not need to arrive with a tidy explanation of what is wrong, and you do not need to make your history easier for me to hear.

I work with adults and couples navigating trauma, difficult relationship patterns, shame, grief, conflict, avoidance, accountability, and change. My style is warm, direct, curious, and practical. I also have a fairly dry—and occasionally dark—sense of humour. I take the work seriously without assuming every minute of counselling needs to feel solemn. Sometimes being able to laugh gives us enough room to stay with something difficult.

My work is integrative and grounded in humanistic, attachment-based, existential, psychodynamic, Adlerian, and systems-informed ways of understanding people. I am interested in the whole person: what has shaped you, how you have learned to relate to yourself and others, what your patterns may be protecting, and the relationships and conditions around you.

I also use structured approaches—including CBT, REBT, DBT, CPT, CAT, and ACT—when they fit the work we are doing. That might involve reducing immediate distress, developing specific skills, examining beliefs, working directly with trauma, or changing a pattern that keeps taking you somewhere you do not want to go. The method should serve the work, not become the work.

Across all of this, I am rooted in the belief that people are pulled toward living in ways that align with what matters to them. When we become disconnected from our values—through our choices, relationships, circumstances, or ways of coping—distress often follows. Counselling can help us understand that disconnection, be honest about what is getting in the way, and move toward a life that feels more coherent and more our own.

Before entering private practice, I spent nearly two decades working in public safety, corrections, community reintegration, and Indigenous-led community safety. That experience shaped my ability to sit with hard things without becoming alarmed, moralizing, or reducing someone to the worst thing they have experienced or done.

You can bring the parts that are uncomfortable, contradictory, difficult to explain, or hard to say out loud. We can start there.

If you are expecting an email from me, please check your junk folder and add una.gair@straightgoodscounselling.ca to your contacts

I’m a clinical counsellor who is comfortable with complexity. You do not need to arrive with a ti... Read More