Vanessa Coady
(Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing)
From Vanessa
If you’ve spent years feeling like something about you is fundamentally wrong — even as your life, from the outside, looks like it’s working — you’re not broken. You’re carrying something that hasn’t had a safe place to land yet.
I work with adults navigating the long aftermath of trauma: the high-functioning exhaustion, the reactions that feel out of proportion, the gap between who you appear to be and who you actually are. As a queer clinician myself, I bring particular depth to that work with queer clients — but this approach is for anyone living that gap, regardless of how you identify. Using EMDR, parts-based therapy, and a grounded understanding of how the body holds experience, we go toward the things that have been running the show — carefully, at a pace that builds real capacity rather than just insight.
This is a space where you don’t have to perform wellness. You just have to show up.
Client Communities
Vanessa works with individuals from diverse backgrounds and life experiences. She has extensive experience supporting clients of all cultures, genders, sexual orientations, and faiths, with particular expertise in working with members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community.
Her inclusive, trauma-informed approach creates a safe and welcoming space where every client can feel seen, heard, and supported in their journey toward growth, resilience, and meaningful change.
Philosophy
For over a decade, health and well-being have been central to Vanessa Coady’s work. She began her career as a Registered Massage Therapist before transitioning into her current role as a Registered Clinical Counsellor. This foundation in health care informs her belief that challenges rarely affect only one part of us—they impact our emotions, thoughts, and physical body. By addressing all three, Vanessa helps clients transform distress into insight, supporting self-soothing, resilience, and emotional balance.
Her own healing journey—rooted in cultivating self-love, self-acceptance, and self-confidence—inspires her compassionate approach to guiding others through their own growth and healing.
Area of Focus
Vanessa offers support for a wide range of concerns, with particular interest in:
- Trauma and recovery from painful experiences
- Self-esteem and identity development
- Anxiety and stress management
- Meaning-making and existential exploration
- Organizational coaching and life transitions
- Managing and coping with chronic pain
Therapeutic Approaches
Most of the people I work with have already done something to try to feel better. They’ve read about their patterns, maybe tried therapy before, developed enough self-awareness to know why they do what they do. And yet something central hasn’t shifted — the reactions still come, the numbness is still there, the sense that something is fundamentally wrong about them persists beneath whatever insight they’ve accumulated.
That gap — between knowing and actually changing — is exactly where I work.
My approach combines EMDR, Ego States therapy, and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, grounded in an understanding of how the nervous system holds experience. After more than a decade working as a Registered Massage Therapist, I bring a genuinely somatic perspective to trauma work — which means I’m paying attention to what your body is carrying, not just what you can articulate about it.
The process has a shape. We begin by getting to know each other — your history, where you are now, and what you need to be able to do the harder work ahead. I’ll equip you with tools before we use them, so you’re never left without something to hold onto. From that foundation of safety, we move gradually toward the things that have been running the show: the old memories, the protective parts, the places where fear took root. We learn to approach them — carefully, with the option to return to safety whenever needed — until they lose their power to dictate your present.
What I’ve found, again and again, is that the parts of ourselves we’ve most tried to avoid are the ones that, once we turn toward them with curiosity instead of dread, give us back the most freedom.
Clients tell me I’m honest with them in a way that feels real, and that I offer structure where other therapists have left them without direction. I take both of those seriously. This work asks a lot of you — and you deserve to know exactly what you’re walking into, and to feel held through it.
If you’ve spent a long time sensing that something hasn’t been reached — I’d like to try.
Modalities
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): a powerful method for processing and moving through trauma.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT): integrating mindfulness with cognitive strategies to manage difficult thoughts and emotions.
Ego State Therapy: working with different parts of the self to promote healing and integration.
Creative techniques such as mindfulness, visualization, body-focused practices, roleplay, and skill-building tools.
Training Highlights
- EMDR Training with EMDRIA Approved EMDR Professional Training Institute
- EMDR & Ego States Advanced Training
- Principles of Polyvagal Theory
- Indigenous Trauma Informed Practice – Honouring Resilience
- Conflict Dynamics and Strategies
- Combining Mindfulness and Cognitive Therapy to Create MBCT
“I’m not going to help you become someone more manageable. I’m going to help you become someone more fully yourself.”
Ready To Take The Next Step?
Vanessa offers complimentary 15 minute consultations to answer any questions you have about how she works, and to give you a chance to see if Vanessa is the right counsellor for you.
We’re here to help you begin:
Phone: (778)715-0112