About Counselling & Health Advocacy by Jenna Reed-Côté RSW, MSW

Sometimes the hardest part of living with a disability isn't only the disability itself.

It's living in a world that often mistakes barriers for limitations.

It's everything that grows around that misunderstanding.

And the quiet question of whether you're allowed to need what you need.

After years of adapting, explaining, minimizing, and trying not to be "too much," many disabled people begin questioning themselves instead.

Not because they're weak.

Not because they're failing to cope.

But because they've spent so long living in environments that asked them to adapt rather than asked whether the environment itself needed to change.

That's the lens I bring to therapy.

Living with a physical disability has taught me that the emotional impact of disability is often about much more than a diagnosis. It can be about navigating inaccessible systems, medical trauma, other people's assumptions, and the quiet pressure to keep adapting, even when adapting is costing you.

It's not my job to tell you what your experiences mean.

It's my job to understand what they mean to you.

I became a therapist because I wanted to be one of the helping professionals I desperately needed growing up.

For a long time, I thought the answer was to keep adapting.

What changed my life wasn't learning how to adapt better.

It was realizing that some of what I had been carrying was never mine to carry in the first place.

That realization continues to shape how I work today.

Before we talk about coping strategies, I want to understand what you've been carrying, how it came to feel like yours to carry, and what it has cost you.

Together, we'll explore what's weighing on you, recognize what may never have belonged to you in the first place, and build practical strategies that honour your needs, values, and capacity.

Outside the therapy room, I've spent years advocating for accessibility and inclusion. I've been a Rick Hansen Foundation Ambassador since 2017, and in 2021 I led the Vancouver team participating in AccessNow's accessibility mapping project, contributing to the largest accessibility survey ever conducted in Canada.

Most importantly, I want you to know this:

You do not have to prove you're struggling enough before you deserve support.

If something is affecting you, it matters.

And if you're wondering whether therapy could help, I'd be honoured to walk alongside you.

Learn more about Disability-Affirmative Therapy