Healing begins when you choose to show up for yourself.
What Psychotherapy Offers
Many people come to psychotherapy with the idea that healing is something done to them — that a therapist will “fix” what’s wrong. But true healing is an active, collaborative process. Psychotherapy invites you to take an empowered role in your own growth. It asks for your willingness to show up, to stay curious, and to explore what it means to heal from the inside out.
At its heart, psychotherapy helps people improve relationships, navigate life’s challenges, reduce trauma symptoms, and move through periods of anxiety, depression, grief, or feeling stuck. But the benefits go much deeper than symptom relief.
The work can help you:
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Know and accept yourself more fully
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Develop a greater sense of purpose and meaning
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Shift painful patterns and beliefs
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Build emotional resilience and nervous system regulation
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Experience more ease, joy, connection, and choice
To experience lasting change, therapy requires regular attendance and active engagement — not just in sessions, but in your daily life. The process has a cumulative effect: over time, small shifts build upon one another, creating profound transformation.
When you commit to the work — showing up consistently, practicing between sessions, and staying open even when it’s hard — psychotherapy can help you move toward greater wholeness, self-trust, and freedom.
Below, we outline the three phases of the therapeutic journey that emerge organically.
The Three Phases of Psychotherapy
1. Building a Foundation: Relationship and Readiness
The first and most essential step in therapy is developing a strong, trusting relationship with your therapist. This relationship becomes the container for healing. At CPYC, our therapists work with warmth, presence, and authenticity to help you feel safe enough to begin this journey.
Therapy is not something that’s done to you — it’s a process we co-create. Your willingness to engage, to be curious, to show up with honesty (even when it’s hard), is what allows the work to unfold. Research consistently shows that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is one of the strongest predictors of positive change — even more than the specific modality used.
This stage may take time, and that’s okay. If there’s a disconnect, it’s important to name it. When therapy feels like a safe, collaborative relationship, your capacity to show up with commitment, courage, responsibility, trust, and openness begins to grow.
2. Doing the Work: Commitment, Courage, and Growth
Once the foundation is in place, therapy moves into deeper territory. At CPYC, we invite clients to commit to a regular weekly time indefinitely — not because we expect you to stay forever, but because healing takes time, rhythm, and steadiness.
You’ll begin to explore the root causes of long-held patterns and symptoms. This can bring up discomfort — anxiety, fear, frustration, sadness, shame, loneliness — and at times, the urge to pull away or shut down. These moments are not signs that therapy isn’t working. They are often the very heart of the work.
Our therapists are trained to stay present with you through these challenging experiences. When faced and worked through in relationship — while staying connected to the body — these moments can become powerful turning points for healing.
Together, you and your therapist will explore what matters most to you: who you are beneath the symptoms, what you’re longing for, and how you want to live. You’ll learn practices and insights tailored to your needs. Small gains matter, and over time, they begin to build on one another. As trust deepens and symptoms lessen, many clients begin to reconnect with deeper capacities: for joy, clarity, compassion, authentic connection, and peace.
3. Ending Well: Integration and Wholeness
The final stage of therapy is about reflecting on how far you’ve come and integrating what you’ve learned. You and your therapist will assess together when it’s time to pause or end your work. This is also a time to address any remaining ruptures, solidify changes, and honour your growth.
Endings in life are often difficult, and therapy offers a chance to experience an ending that is conscious, supported, and nurturing. Rather than a loss, this phase can feel like a graduation — a celebration of your resilience and your inner resources.
Through this process, many clients come to recognize that the tools and insights they’ve developed are now part of them — embedded in both body and mind. You will have cultivated the capacity to care for yourself, to meet life with presence, and to continue growing long after therapy ends.
This is the quiet gift of deep psychotherapy: healing that stays with you.
“Psychotherapy is not meant to change you; it is meant to find you.”
Our goal is to help people overcome trauma symptoms so they can be more connected in relationship to themselves, others and the collective.
At Collingwood Psychotherapy & Yoga Centre, we offer you individual, couple, family, and group psychotherapy grounded in relational, trauma and neuroscientifically informed psychotherapeutic theories.
Our groups include the Men's Group, the Collective Healing Group and at times we offer groups for Teens.
For people who want to go deeper in a shorter period of time, we offer individual and group intensives (Whole Again) designed to accelerate your healing journey and provide you with profound healing.
We offer clinical supervision for psychotherapists, and seminars for professionals and organizations.
Our team consists of experienced, and compassionate psychotherapists, and an amazing Office Manager.
Our Mission & Vision
At CPYC, our mission is to help clients heal from the roots of trauma by guiding them to engage their inner technologies so they can move from fragmentation towards wholeness. We empower individuals to connect deeply with their inner worlds so they may embody higher principles such as love, joy, and compassion.
By fostering profound inner transformation, we awaken a shift in the collective consciousness—one that elevates the choices we make as individuals and as a society. As congruence, peace, compassion, and interconnectedness become embodied truths, they begin to shape how we live, relate, and co-create—not only with each other but with the planet and all beings, seen and unseen. This remembrance of our interconnection naturally guides the way we steward our resources, nurture our communities, and design the systems that shape our world.
