Psychotherapy & Wellness Programs
About HHC
The vision for Hummingbird Healing Connections as a place to offer individual and group therapy alongside wellness programs has been in formation for a long time even though Hummingbird Healing Connections itself was only formally registered in May of 2020. The vision is shaped in part by an important moment in Susan’s life journey several decades ago when a therapist introduced her to the book The Healing Connection: How Women Form Relationships in Therapy and in Life. This became the lens for Susan’s vision and approach to therapy.
HHC seeks to be a place where persons can experience a healing relationship that facilitates their therapeutic goals. This means that the therapist is not the expert who is going to “fix” the client, but that together the therapist and client collaborate in identifying what goals are important to them and the Therapist helps the client to find the capacity from within themselves and resources (insights, educational resources, mindfulness meditation, emotional intelligence, etc) that the client can use to bring about their healing. Healing takes place when we can live authentically, able to be our best version of our self and are able to participate in meaningful relationships with other people and in community.
Some of the programming offered at HHC seeks to facilitate persons building healthy committed partnerships, to strengthen their connections, as well as programs that build community. Some will use this program as premarital counselling, others may be looking for ways to strengthen a long term relationship.
When we lose our health, a loved one dies, or we lose a significant relationship, even our pet, or other life events require us to move, we can find ourselves feeling lost, overwhelmed and alone in our grief. We live in a culture that is adverse to grief and avoids emotional pain making it hard to find good education about grief and safe people who are not afraid to journey with us in our losses. HHC recognizes the need for individual and group grief support, taking the view that grief is a natural response when connections are broken, and not a medical problem to be fixed with a pill or pushed away by keeping busy.
Our wellbeing and healing is not simply a matter of good cognitive or emotional patterns it is also an embodied experience. We live in bodies that experience the consequences of our emotional pain and cognitive challenges, our bodies are impacted by our relationships with others and the more than human world. To this end HHC offers Forest Therapy as an embodied mindfulness meditation practice that takes place in nature.
HHC clients can benefit from Susan’s connections with other therapists and healers when HHC will occasionally offer programs in art therapy and other wellness activities from these professionals. By doing this HHC seeks to offer wellness programs that compliment the work of psychotherapy, grief healing, and facilitate a person’s ability to participate in their healing and wholeness making.
Photo by Kayla Furlone - kayla.furlone@gmail.com
About Susan Harrison, MDiv, ThM, RP, CTMH
I am a cisgendered white woman whose pronouns are she/her. I am a settler on the land that was taken care of for generations before me by the Attawandaran nation as well as the Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee and Wyandotte Confederacies. I am a Registered Psychotherapist (RP) since 2017. I bring several decades of work experiences as a minister, healthcare chaplain, intercultural exchange coordinator, interfaith dialogue facilitator and social justice advocate in the US, Canada and the Middle East to my current work as a Psychotherapist. Having been raised in the US but also having lived in central Africa for part of my childhood I am no stranger to the life journey of trying to figure out who I am and where I could find true belonging. A significant event in my young adult years which resulted in me spending some time paralyzed gave me an opportunity to learn at an early age that we cannot take anything about life for granted, the ways in which an able-bodied society disconnects us when we live with physical challenges, and the challenges of navigating existential distress. As a daughter, aunt, mother of two adult children, and a divorcee, I can relate to the challenges we all face when trying to build and sustain healthy connections in our families as well as our broader world. As an immigrant to Canada and someone who has lived in a wide variety of places, urban and rural, I recognize that we often have multiple belongings/hybrid identities that form our values, influence our choices, provide us with insights different from those around us, which can both help and hinder our ability to form and sustain healing connections.
Significant relationships with family, therapists, teachers, mentors, physicians, clergy and friends have contributed to who I am today, my passion for social justice, and my desire to accompany others on their own discovery of healing and wholeness in their lives. Connecting with my family, friends, nature (the more-than-human-world), cycling, gardening, photography, snorkelling, gardening, wildcrafting, writing, drumming, raising butterflies are some of the things that help me find, nurture and sustain me for this life journey.
Accreditations
Registered Psychotherapist (RP) with College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario CRPO #006890
Certified Clinical Telemental Health Provider (CTMH)
Certified Forest Therapy Guide, Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT)
Memberships
OAMHP Ontario Association of Mental Health Professionals
“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”
— Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
The Hummingbird Totem
The Totem Hummingbird teaches you to appreciate and love the miracle of living, and invites you to focus on the positive in your life. They are messengers of peace, they heal your body and soul and they lead you through life’s challenges. Of all the birds, they are the most talented flyers: they can hover in one place, fly sideways, backwards and forwards. They teach us to look back to our past, but not to dwell, and to instead move forward. Their hovering and speed are believed to be a skill for guiding people. The Hummingbirds shows us how to savour our joys and live in every moment as they do when hovering over each flower.