Jay Hails

My strength lies in helping you identify and celebrate your own unique strengths. The fact that you're looking here for help already tells me you're strong.

If you’re overwhelmed or stuck, or you’ve lost something precious, I can help. If your feelings are too intense, or you don’t even know what you’re feeling anymore, I can walk you through that fog. I offer my clients empathy, respect, curiosity, appreciation, and honesty. 

I also offer my clients agency and control. I'm a professional and I'm providing the therapy, but you're the expert on you. It's your therapy, and you're the one in charge.

I also work with kids—on feelings, behaviour, and learning. I'm great at making connections, assessing strengths, solving problems, and celebrating breakthroughs with children and their caregivers. I spent years working as a special education teacher and school counsellor. Schools are complex systems, but I know how to help children and families navigate them.

I'm a Masters level Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC) with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA), and I've worked with people of all ages and diverse backgrounds, in school, corporate, and private practice settings.

I have expertise in helping people with these concerns:

• anxiety, worries, & managing stress
• celebrating 2SLGBTQ+ identities
• suicide prevention
• trauma response & recovery
• life changes
• setting boundaries
• relationship breakdown
• processing guilt
• loss of a pet
• infidelity
• grief & loss

Here are some of the child and youth issues where I've had success:

• childhood anxiety
• friendship skills
• self-esteem
• child cognitive development
• school refusal
• adolescent emotional needs
• challenging behaviours
• self-harm
• parenting problems
• school situations
• family conflict
• worries
• making friends
• coping with separation or divorce
• selective mutism 
• questioning gender identities, roles, and orientations

I'll try to avoid jargon here, and I won't use any pretentious acronyms. But some people want to know things like this. My work is informed by a few different models, including these:

• Gordon Neufeld's attachment-based, developmental approach
• Carl Rogers' client-centred therapy
• Gabor Maté's work on trauma
• positive psychology
• cognitive behaviour therapy
• harm reduction
• trauma-informed work
• narrative therapy
• culturally responsive counselling

Free consultation:

• I'm happy to spend a few minutes talking "off the clock" so you can decide if I'm a good fit. It's generally agreed that the therapeutic relationship is the number one predictor of therapy's success.
• We can talk in person, in my cozy fourth-floor office on West Broadway; or virtually—on Google Meet, FaceTime, telephone—from any place you feel comfortable. I've had clients who prefer phone sessions while they're out walking, and clients who like a video call from the comfort of a vehicle.