Speaking & Training
Honest conversations about surviving, rebuilding and finding your voice
I offer educational and motivational speaking for conferences, organizations, professional teams and community events.
My speaking draws on graduate training in counselling psychology and professional experience across domestic-violence services, healthcare and hospital-based response, community mental health, crisis support, outreach, education and group facilitation.
I bring together clinical knowledge and real-world experience to make difficult subjects understandable, practical and human. Whether speaking with professionals, community members or people rebuilding after difficult experiences, my goal is to create conversations that are thoughtful, grounded and hopeful without minimizing the realities people may have lived through.
Speaking Topics
Rebuilding After Abuse
Leaving an abusive or harmful relationship does not always mean its effects immediately disappear. This presentation explores the emotional impacts that can remain after leaving, including self-doubt, fear, guilt, emotional disconnection, difficulty trusting and losing a sense of identity.
The conversation focuses on understanding survival responses, rebuilding self-trust and creating space for a life that is no longer organized around another person’s control.
Parenting Through High-Conflict Relationships
High-conflict relationships, separation and ongoing co-parenting stress can affect both parents and children.
This presentation explores how conflict and trauma can influence emotional regulation, parenting responses, boundaries and the parent-child relationship. Participants are introduced to practical ways of responding to children’s emotional needs while also recognizing and managing their own stress responses.
This presentation provides education and emotional-support strategies. It does not provide legal advice or make recommendations about individual parenting or custody matters.
When Survival Mode Follows You
Survival responses can continue even after the immediate danger or hardship has passed. People may remain constantly alert, emotionally shut down, reactive, exhausted or focused on meeting everyone else’s needs.
This presentation helps audiences understand why these responses can develop, how they may once have offered protection and what can support a gradual movement toward safety, connection and choice.
Finding Your Voice After Hardship
Difficult experiences can affect how people understand themselves, their future and what they believe is possible.
This motivational talk explores rebuilding after adversity without minimizing what happened or pressuring people to find a positive meaning in painful experiences. It focuses on courage, identity, hope, self-compassion and the gradual process of creating a life that feels authentic and personally meaningful.
Supporting Survivors With Compassion
Designed for professionals and community organizations, this presentation examines how language, assumptions and service responses can affect whether survivors feel safe seeking support.
Topics can include trauma-informed communication, barriers to disclosure, responding without blame, cultural considerations and creating more inclusive support for survivors of different genders and backgrounds.
Workshops
Parenting After a High-Conflict Relationship
A planned group for parents navigating separation, co-parenting stress or the effects of a harmful relationship.
The group will explore:
How conflict and trauma can affect parents and children
Recognizing your own stress and survival responses
Supporting children’s emotional needs
Strengthening connection and emotional safety
Establishing and maintaining boundaries
Parenting in a way that reflects your values
Caring for yourself while continuing to care for your children
Rebuilding After Abuse
A planned psychoeducational group for people working to reconnect with themselves after an abusive, controlling or emotionally harmful relationship.
Topics will include:
Understanding the effects of coercion and emotional abuse
Recognizing survival responses
Rebuilding identity and self-trust
Working with guilt, fear and self-doubt
Developing boundaries
Reconnecting with personal values
Moving forward without minimizing what happened
Selected Speaking, Education & Community Work
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Co-presented “You Serve Men?! How to Operate an All-Gender Shelter,” examining inclusive shelter services and considerations when supporting men and gender-diverse survivors.
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Panel focused on individual and collective action to address gender-based violence.
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Through my work connected with the Domestic Abuse Response Team (DART), I contributed to healthcare-provider education on recognizing and responding to domestic violence and to the expansion of DART services within rural hospital settings.
This work involved collaboration across healthcare, mental-health, justice and community systems and continues to inform how I approach professional education about trauma-informed and survivor-centred responses to domestic violence.
My work also included contributing to the launch and expansion of DART services in rural hospitals through collaboration with healthcare, mental-health, justice and community professionals.
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Acknowledged Project Contributor
Provided guidance and support to a simulation-based education project designed to strengthen healthcare responses to domestic violence. I am not an author of the study, but my contribution is acknowledged in the published article.
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Co-presented on the Domestic Abuse Response Team and the importance of recognizing and responding to domestic violence within healthcare settings.
The presentation explored how DART connects patients experiencing domestic violence with specialized support, including crisis intervention, risk assessment, safety planning and referrals to community resources. It also highlighted the importance of collaboration between healthcare professionals, domestic-violence advocates, mental-health services and community partners.
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My community work has included presentations and educational programming with junior-high and high-school students focused on healthy relationships, recognizing concerning relationship patterns, boundaries, help-seeking, self-worth and available community supports.
These experiences have contributed to my understanding of prevention, early education and the broader systems surrounding relationship violence, and continue to inform my work with adults, parents and people recovering from harmful relationships.
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I co-presented the Four Winds Public School Inspire Program to the Sturgeon Public Schools Board of Trustees.
The presentation highlighted the program’s work with Grade 7–9 students in areas including leadership, healthy relationships, bullying, self-image, societal pressures, wellness and community involvement. We also discussed the partnership between Four Winds Public School and the Jessica Martel Memorial Foundation and how the program supported students in strengthening their self-worth, making healthy choices and developing positive relationships.
View the Sturgeon Public Schools public-board meeting minutes
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Documentary Interview Participant - Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters and Hotshot Films
Participated in an on-camera interview during production of a documentary project examining survivors’ experiences of domestic abuse and the legal system.
The project explored the barriers survivors may encounter while navigating legal processes and what survivors want judges, lawyers and the public to understand about the realities of domestic abuse.
My participation in the production formed part of my broader advocacy and community involvement concerning domestic violence, survivor experiences and the systems people may need to navigate while seeking safety and healing.