WHAT IS MARLISE’S APPROACH TO THERAPY?

Marlise Meilan Thompson offers therapy from an integrative approach that supports healing through warmth, embodiment, cultural humility, and relational awareness. It begins from the understanding that suffering does not arise in isolation. Personal distress is shaped by nervous system responses, relationship histories, social location, systemic oppression, intergenerational trauma, colonial violence, and the wider conditions in which people live.

Marlise’s compassion-focused foundation helps clients relate to themselves with greater gentleness rather than shame, criticism, or self-blame. Therapy may explore how protective patterns developed for good reasons, while supporting the growth of inner safety, courage, and care. Her trauma-informed lens emphasizes choice, pacing, collaboration, consent, and emotional safety, recognizing that healing cannot be rushed and that the your body and boundaries are important sources of wisdom.

Marlise’s somatically-oriented approach brings attention to the body as part of the therapeutic process. Sensations, breath, movement, tension, collapse, numbness, activation, and grounding are explored with curiosity, helping clients notice how their bodies carry stress, protection, grief, and resilience. Rather than focusing only on thoughts or stories, therapy supports reconnection with embodied experience at a tolerable pace.

Grounded in Contemplative, psychodynamic, and humanistic psychotherapy, Marlise’s approach also values present-moment awareness, mindfulness, compassion, and the therapist’s own capacity for openness and attunement. Difficult emotions are not treated as problems to eliminate, but as experiences that can be met with curiosity and care.

Centring a decolonized and anti-oppressive stance invites ongoing reflection on power, privilege, identity, culture, race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and other intersecting realities. It challenges pathologizing frameworks and honours clients’ ancestral, communal, spiritual, creative, and relational sources of knowledge. The therapeutic relationship becomes a collaborative space where clients can reconnect with dignity, agency, embodied wisdom, and their own definitions of healing.

This approach can integrate well into interdisciplinary care by acting as the relational, nervous-system, meaning-making, and justice-oriented layer of a broader healthcare plan.

In collaboration with physicians, nurse practitioners, psychiatrists, dietitians, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, bodyworkers, Indigenous/cultural healers, social workers, and community supports, a clinical director helps ensure that care is not reduced to symptoms, compliance, weight, medication, diagnosis, or behaviour change alone. Interprofessional care is strongest when different providers work with the client, family, and community toward shared goals, rather than operating in isolated silos.

Practically, this means obtaining the client’s informed consent to communicate with other providers, clarifying what information may be shared, and participating in coordinated care planning when appropriate. The therapist may help the team understand trauma responses, dissociation, shame, avoidance, medical mistrust, body-based fear, oppression-related stress, or cultural context that could otherwise be misread as “non-compliance” or “resistance.”

With medical providers, therapy can support clients in preparing for appointments, tracking nervous system responses, advocating for themselves, processing diagnoses, and recovering from harmful healthcare experiences. A trauma-informed approach emphasizes safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, choice, and resisting retraumatization, which can be especially important in medical settings where clients may feel powerless or objectified.

With dietitians, especially in eating disorder, disordered eating, chronic illness, digestive distress, or body image work, therapy can complement nutrition care by addressing shame, embodiment, control, grief, appetite cues, food trauma, cultural food meanings, and the social conditions that shape eating. In eating disorder care, multidisciplinary teams commonly include medical, psychiatric, therapeutic, and dietetic support.

A decolonized and anti-oppressive integration also means questioning whose knowledge is centred. Care planning should make room for cultural safety, humility, mutual decision-making, and awareness of systemic racism and discrimination in healthcare. In Canada, cultural safety and humility are increasingly named as healthcare expectations, especially in relation to Indigenous-specific racism and care for structurally marginalized communities.

The clinical director’s role is not to replace medical or nutritional expertise, but to help the whole team stay attuned to the client as a full person: embodied, relational, cultural, spiritual, historical, and socially located. Integrated care, in this model, asks not only “What treatment is indicated?” but also “What feels safe enough, meaningful enough, culturally respectful enough, and empowering enough for healing to actually happen?” 

WHAT IS CONTEMPLATIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY?

Contemplative Psychotherapy is an approach to therapy that integrates contemporary psychological theory with contemplative traditions, especially mindfulness and Buddhist psychology. At its core, it is based on the belief that people are fundamentally whole, wise, and capable of healing, even when they are experiencing distress, confusion, trauma, or emotional pain. Rather than seeing people as broken or needing to be “fixed,” Contemplative Psychotherapy views suffering as something that can be met with curiosity, compassion, and awareness.

This approach emphasizes the therapeutic relationship as a space of presence, openness, and non-judgment. The therapist works to be fully attentive and grounded, supporting clients in slowing down and noticing their thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and habitual patterns. Through this process, clients may begin to recognize how they relate to themselves and others, including where they may avoid discomfort, criticize themselves, or become stuck in repetitive or protective patterns.

Contemplative Psychotherapy often incorporates mindfulness practices, reflection, body awareness, and compassionate inquiry. However, it is not necessarily religious or spiritual in a formal sense. Clients do not need to hold any particular beliefs to benefit from it. The focus is on developing a more direct and accepting relationship with one’s inner experience.

A key aim of Contemplative Psychotherapy is helping clients cultivate self-awareness, emotional resilience, and compassion. By learning to stay present with difficult experiences, clients may find greater clarity, flexibility, and connection. This can be especially supportive for people navigating anxiety, depression, grief, identity questions, relationship challenges, trauma, or life transitions.

Ultimately, Contemplative Psychotherapy invites people to relate to themselves with more gentleness and honesty. It supports healing not by eliminating all pain, but by helping clients meet their lives with greater awareness, courage, and compassion.

WHAT IS PSYCHODYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY?

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a form of talk therapy that explores how a person’s past experiences, early relationships, unconscious feelings, and inner conflicts shape their present-day emotions, behaviours, relationships, and sense of self. It is rooted in psychoanalytic theory, but contemporary psychodynamic therapy is often more collaborative, relational, and flexible than traditional psychoanalysis.

A central idea in psychodynamic therapy is that people may repeat patterns without fully understanding why. These patterns might appear in romantic relationships, family dynamics, friendships, work, self-esteem, emotional regulation, or responses to stress. Therapy helps bring these patterns into awareness so the client can understand them with more compassion and make different choices.

Psychodynamic therapy often pays close attention to the therapeutic relationship itself. Feelings, expectations, fears, or relational habits that emerge between client and therapist may reflect dynamics that also happen elsewhere in the client’s life. Exploring these moments can help the client better understand how they relate to others and how they protect themselves from pain, rejection, shame, or vulnerability.

Rather than focusing only on symptom reduction, psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to support deeper self-understanding and emotional integration. It may explore dreams, memories, fantasies, grief, anger, desire, attachment wounds, identity, and the ways a person has adapted to survive difficult experiences. Symptoms such as anxiety, depression, self-criticism, or relationship distress are understood not simply as problems to eliminate, but as meaningful signals connected to a person’s inner world and life history.

Psychodynamic therapy can be short-term or long-term, depending on the client’s needs and goals. It may be especially helpful for people who want to understand recurring relational patterns, unresolved emotional pain, identity questions, or the roots of persistent distress. At its best, it offers a thoughtful, curious, and emotionally honest space where clients can develop greater freedom, self-awareness, and capacity for connection.

WHAT IS HUMANISTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY?

Humanistic psychotherapy is a compassionate, collaborative approach to therapy that emphasizes a person’s inherent capacity for growth, healing, choice, and self-understanding. Rather than viewing people primarily through the lens of symptoms, diagnosis, or pathology, humanistic therapy focuses on the whole person: their emotions, values, relationships, lived experiences, sense of meaning, and hopes for change.

At the heart of humanistic psychotherapy is the belief that people are not “broken,” but may become disconnected from their authentic needs, feelings, creativity, or inner wisdom due to painful experiences, social pressures, trauma, shame, or relationships where they were not fully seen or accepted. Therapy offers a supportive space to reconnect with these parts of the self.

Humanistic therapists often prioritize qualities such as empathy, genuineness, warmth, respect, and non-judgment. The therapeutic relationship itself is considered central to healing. When clients feel deeply heard and accepted, they may begin to explore difficult emotions, clarify their values, make sense of their experiences, and move toward more authentic ways of living.

Humanistic psychotherapy is often associated with person-centered therapy, Gestalt therapy, existential therapy, and emotion-focused approaches. Depending on the therapist’s style, sessions may include open-ended conversation, emotional exploration, present-moment awareness, reflection on life choices, attention to the body, or exploration of personal meaning and identity.

This approach can support people navigating anxiety, depression, grief, relationship challenges, life transitions, self-esteem concerns, trauma, identity questions, or a general feeling of being stuck or disconnected. It is especially well suited to people who want therapy to feel relational, reflective, empowering, and grounded in their own inner experience.

Ultimately, humanistic psychotherapy helps clients develop greater self-awareness, self-compassion, emotional honesty, and freedom to make choices that feel more aligned with who they truly are.

HOW DO WE DECOLONIZE PSYCHOTHERAPY?

To “decolonize psychotherapy” means to critically examine how counselling and mental health care have been shaped by colonial, Eurocentric assumptions, and to make space for more culturally responsive, community-rooted, and socially aware approaches to healing. It does not mean rejecting all contemporary psychotherapy, but rather questioning the idea that it is neutral, universal, or superior to other ways of understanding distress, wellness, identity, and relationship.

A decolonized approach recognizes that many clients’ struggles are not only individual or internal, but are also shaped by histories of colonization, racism, forced assimilation, migration, displacement, poverty, gendered violence, ableism, and other systems of oppression. Rather than locating the “problem” solely within the client, therapists are encouraged to consider the broader social, historical, political, and intergenerational contexts of suffering.

In practice, decolonizing psychotherapy involves humility, accountability, and collaboration. Therapists must reflect on their own identities, privileges, biases, professional training, and assumptions about what healing should look like. They may need to move away from rigid expert-client hierarchies and toward relationships grounded in consent, respect, mutuality, and client self-determination.

It also means making room for Indigenous, Black, diasporic, spiritual, somatic, land-based, family-based, and collective healing traditions, when these are meaningful to the client. This may include honouring storytelling, ceremony, ancestral knowledge, community connection, language, culture, and non-Eurocentric understandings of the self.

A decolonized psychotherapy practice is trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, culturally responsive, and attentive to power. It asks therapists not only to adapt techniques, but to reconsider the foundations of their work: Who defines wellness? Whose knowledge is valued? What harms have mental health systems caused? How can therapy support liberation, dignity, belonging, and repair?

Ultimately, decolonizing psychotherapy is an ongoing process, not a fixed achievement.