Online Disability-Affirmative Therapy in Vancouver, BC
What if the problem isn’t your disability—but the therapy you were offered?
You do not need to convince me that your disability is real.
You do not need to justify your limitations.
You do not need to earn the right to receive support.
My approach is disability-affirming and anti-ableist, recognizing that distress often comes not only from health conditions themselves, but also from inaccessible systems and societal attitudes toward disability.
Perhaps you've experienced:
medical trauma or years of having to fight to be believed
feeling pressured to be positive, resilient, or grateful when you're exhausted
feeling ashamed for needing accommodations, support, or help
constantly having to explain, advocate, or defend your needs
feeling like a burden
wondering if your experiences are valid because they have been questioned for so long
Many disabled people become so skilled at adapting that other people stop noticing what adaptation is costing them.
Sometimes people only see the performance.
They don't see the price.
What We'll Explore Together
Disability-Affirmative Therapy isn't about teaching you to adapt better. Many disabled people have been adapting their whole lives.
It's about understanding the impact of those adaptations, recognizing what was never yours to carry, and helping you move forward in ways that honour your needs, values, and capacity.
Because every person's experiences are unique, therapy will look different for everyone. Depending on what's most important to you, together we may explore:
Your Experiences
How your disability or chronic illness shapes your daily life—not just your diagnosis.
The impact of ableism, inaccessible systems, and medical trauma on your mental health.
Recognizing what belongs to you—and what may be a response to living in a world that wasn't built with disability in mind.
Your Strengths
Recognizing the resilience, creativity, problem-solving, and self-advocacy skills you've already developed.
Building on what's already working rather than starting from the assumption that something is "wrong."
Identifying the supports and strategies that help you participate more fully in your life.
Your Voice
Building confidence in self-advocacy across healthcare, work, school, and relationships.
Using collaborative role-play to prepare for medical appointments, accommodation requests, or difficult conversations.
Exploring boundaries that protect your energy, capacity, and well-being.
Your Way Forward
Setting goals that reflect your values rather than other people's expectations.
Rebuilding trust in your needs, limits, and right to take up space.
Creating a way forward that feels sustainable, meaningful, and right for you.
Check out our recent blog posts on Disability-Affirmative Therapy
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.
Perhaps you're considering Disability-Affirmative Therapy but still have some questions...
How is this going to feel different?
My hope is that you'll spend less time explaining your disability and more time exploring what it's like to live with it.
You won't have to convince me that your experiences are real before we can begin working on what matters most to you.
My lived experience doesn't tell me what your disability is like. It reminds me not to assume that I already know.
You are the expert on your own life. My role is to understand what living with a disability means for you—not what anyone else thinks it should mean.
I've felt dismissed and unheard by healthcare providers. Will therapy feel similar?
I'm sorry you've had those experiences. Unfortunately, many disabled people can relate.
Therapy with me isn't about proving your experiences or convincing me they're real. It's about understanding how those experiences have affected you and working together toward the goals that matter most to you.
There may be times when I gently challenge a thought or offer another perspective, but that's very different from questioning your reality, minimizing your experiences, or dismissing your needs.
What if I feel invalidated during therapy?
I hope you'll tell me.
Therapy is a relationship, and relationships work best when we can talk openly about what's helping, what isn't, and what needs to change.
If something doesn't feel right, I want us to explore it together. You shouldn't have to sit quietly with those feelings.
What if my family, caregiver, or healthcare team disagree with what I want from therapy?
That can be incredibly difficult.
When several people are involved in your care, it's common for everyone to have different ideas about what's best.
My role isn't to decide for you.
It's to help you better understand your own needs, values, goals, and boundaries so you can make decisions that feel right for you and communicate them with confidence.
Do you only focus on my disability or diagnosis?
No.
Disability may be an important part of your life, but it is only one part of who you are.
We might talk about disability, chronic illness, relationships, grief, burnout, identity, self-worth, advocacy, life transitions, or something completely different.
Wherever our conversations take us, my goal is to support you as a whole person—not simply as a diagnosis.