Sean is a positive, practical, and very experienced Registered Social Worker with over 25 years of varied experience supporting diverse communities. She truly believes that each client deserves to enjoy greater healing, growth, happiness, success, and satisfaction in life and works to empower individuals, families, and couples to realize their full potential by identifying their goals and taking small steps towards achieving them. Sean also helps clients to identify and celebrate the many small successes that help to maintain motivation and create meaningful lasting change. She specializes in supporting clients to make progress on challenges related to anxiety, depression, trauma, anger management, stress management, self-esteem, grief, loss, parenting, child development, behaviour issues, communication, conflict resolution, relationship issues, and work/life balance.
With a Master of Social Work, Honours Bachelor of Social Work, and Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology from York University, Sean is registered with both the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Services Workers (OCSWSSW) and the Ontario Association of Social Workers (OASW). She has also completed additional training in Dialectic Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Brief Intervention for School Clinicians (BRISC), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Solution Focused Therapy, and Trauma-Informed Therapy. For Sean, actively listening, demonstrating empathy, being in tune with clients, and acknowledging and validating clients throughout therapy is an essential part of the process of building trust and a strong therapeutic relationship. Closely collaborating with clients and working with them toward their goals is also central to the empowerment process that Sean engages in with each client.
Providing therapeutic mental health support to individuals, families, and couples is both a rewarding calling and a blessing for Sean, who deeply enjoys supporting individuals, families, and couples to live more meaningful, healthy, and happy lives. Sean’s work has focused on serving adolescents, African-Canadian clients, individuals, parents, children and families struggling with conflict, and issues related to child welfare, fostering, and adoption/post-adoption. Her experience includes working within the school board as a Mental Health Worker, in child welfare on fostering and adoption issues, and as a Child and Youth Advocate for the Province of Ontario providing rights advice and representing the interests of children and youth at case conferences involving the child welfare, justice, and education sectors. She has provided mental health presentations, bereavement retreats, workshops on healthy relationships and coping with stress, Anti-Black Racism forums, and sat on Anti-Black Racism panels. Sean currently provides support to students at the secondary and elementary levels as well as to their families and also runs Black Youth Groups and Women’s Clubs at the secondary level.
To build strength, resilience, and determination, Sean helps clients learn to see and accept challenges as opportunities to learn, grow, and change. She also encourages clients to actively discover what brings them true happiness, and to make happiness a priority and regular activity in their life routine. She supports clients in accepting their strengths and weaknesses, learning new ways of living, creating increased meaning and purpose in life, and finding greater peace by identifying and accepting what is beyond their control. Building greater resilience is a lifelong process for Sean and she enjoys supporting clients as they renew, restore, rebuild and evolve in their journey to greater resilience and happiness.
Understanding that each client is the expert on their own life and reality is also central to Sean’s practice. Her approach includes engaging in critical reflection on her social location with respect to each client and in Anti-Oppressive practice to identify and construct power within each client amid the systemic inequities which negatively impact them. Sean also appreciates the power of three C’s in life - Choice, Chance, and Change - and of how important it is to make the Choice and to take the Chance when you want to make Change. She encourages people to discover what makes them happier and more fulfilled in life and empowers them to pursue that more fully.
In her free time, Sean enjoys dancing and playing ice hockey. These activities have been and remain among the pillars of her happiness.