Toronto Therapist Specializing in Mental Health, Addiction, Trauma and LGBTQ+ Therapy - Sly Sarkisova
Individual Psychotherapy
When you choose to engage with psychotherapy, we will delve into co-creating
a space tailored specifically to your needs. I provide a holistic, structurally integrative, trauma-informed framework for understanding your past experiences, current challenges, strengths, resiliencies, and opportunities for thriving.
With a background in working with folks with severe and persistent structural barriers, intergenerational and colonial traumas & family legacies, I foreground the understanding that mental health & emotional health are a product of internal and external resources that enable better functioning.
With care, attunement, empathy, and accountability folks who are interested and engaged to do integrative emotional processing work are encouraged to connect for service. If you feel empowered and ready to tune inwards to deal with emotional legacies and processes, raise self awareness, improve relational health and thriving, you will be supported to dig deeper into transformative,
self led, intuitively mirrored growth work.
Relational Therapy
Couples, Poly, Chosen Family
Whether you are interested in building a deeper friendship, navigating creating kinship structures, opening up or supporting your romantic partnership(s) to thrive, or dealing with family of origin problems, legacies and structural burdens...
We will work together to facilitate a connective space, centering your capacity to experience groundedness, build emotional safety, create attunement, responsiveness, and de-escalating skills for repair.
From an attachment perspective that acknowledges the powerful legacies of our earliest bonding moments, we will discover emotional stuck points, conflict triggers, reactivity, and longstanding patterns that no longer serve relational dynamics. We will strive to create dynamic and engaging awareness that allows members to meet each other with care, compassion, reflexivity and accountability.
Mental Health & Substance Misuse
Traditionally, the field of addiction medicine has been focused on an abstinence and a disease model. This model has had limited success.
If you are seeking an alternative model for examining your relationship to substance use and harm, we will create a welcoming, non-judgmental and pragmatic approach that centers understanding how your substance use patterns hold functional components. We will seek to examine the ways in which you feel unsatisfied, harmed or at risk with your use patterns, and work on alternative coping capacities.
My expertise and areas of specialty are in trauma informed, harm reduction and anti-oppressive approaches to mental health, problematic substance use, and addiction. I have an extensive background supporting folks with a range of addiction and substance misuse issues, including polysubstance abuse, gambling, and sex addiction.
We will take an integrative, holistic approach that helps us understand, explore and manage all aspects of your life as they interact with substance misuse, addictions and any potential underlying mental health concerns. Whether you are seeking to curb harmful aspects of your substance use patterns, enhance your emotional coping skills, or work on deeper rooted issues as they affect you...we will co-create space to help you thrive.
FEE SCHEDULE
Sessions are $150/hr for individuals and $175/hr for couples & families, HST inclusive. We will meet in a confidential setting where privacy is maintained. Sliding scale is no longer available. Insurance plans widely cover MSW Psychotherapists, so check with your provider.**
ZOOM SESSIONS are available during COVID-19, as well as to those who live abroad in Montreal, New York, San Francisco or across Canada and the United States.
Sex Therapy
Areas of Focus in my Practice:
- Understanding trauma & negotiating consent
- Navigating mental health or illness triggers when opening up to non-monogamy or polyamory
- Emotional & relational health
- Boundaries
- Sexual Abuse histories
- Sexuality & desire
- Exploration of Kinks, perversion
- Consolidating identities
- Externalizing shame, guilt, oppression, harm, impacts of violence
- Increasing comfort & autonomy physically and emotionally
- Sexual addiction, or self identified practices that cause discomfort or negative consequences
What helps you have the kind of sexuality, desire, and intimacy you want? Whether it be solo, casual, partnered, non-monogamous, play oriented, romantic or otherwise - we will look at embracing desire and embodiment as you deem it important to you.
2SLGBTQ & Gender Identity
Many folks who self identify within Two-Spirited, Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender, Transsexual, Intersex, Queer and Questioning, and Queer and Trans People of Colour (QTPOC) communities prefer a therapist that matches their understanding of self identification and lived experience.
I am well situated as having identified with an atypical gender narrative as a queer and trans person who was forced to disrupt trans health care practices a decade before it was accessible. I have intimate experience with systemic barriers and impacts as they relate to physical and mental health disabilities and trauma legacies.
My longstanding mission has been to create decolonizing and intersectional practice in mental health care that centres compassion , building safety in relationship, and welcomes client led, depathologizing healing space. I constantly educate myself around axes of intersectionality in terms of race, racism, ableism, disabled or crip identities, cissexism, transphobia, queerphobia, biphobia and colonialism.
Areas of specialization include:
Trans/masculinities, non-binary identity, trans femininity, exploring/exploding identification; off loading shame; dealing with family and societal legacies and realities of intersectional oppression; interrupting trauma cycles in our relationships and communities; sex and sexuality, body image, emotional intimacy; and, issues around depression, anxiety, emotion regulation, functioning through illness/disability; neurodivergence; deepening resiliency, improving coping capacity & external supports.