Tianna Mapstone
MPS‑AT · Canadian Certified Counsellor · Founder of Wild Light Creative Counselling
“I am passionate about supporting individuals and families to overcome pain and trauma, and to work towards wholeness, healing, and ultimately building lives that express their full potential.”— Tianna Mapstone
MPS‑AT · Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC)
Children, youth & adults
Counselling, Art Therapy, DBT, EMDR, Mindfulness & somatic, IFS, Narative
English
Who I am
I am a trained clinical therapist, counsellor, art therapist, and founder of Wild Light Creative Counselling. I have been in the helping profession since 2006, and a Certified Clinical Counsellor (CCC) with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association since 2021. I have an extensive background supporting families with complex concerns, and a passion for helping people heal from pain and trauma and live live fuller lives. And I have a Masters degree in Psychotherapy, with a specialization in Art Therapy (MPS-AT), and am a registered Clinical Therapist (CT) with the Association of Counselling Therapists of Alberta (ACTA), as well as a Professional Art Therapist with the Canadian Art Therapy Association (CATA).
I work with adults, children and teens affected by trauma, grief and loss, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, ADHD, relationship problems, parenting struggles, PTSD, c-PTSD, and have a particular interest in supporting those healing from abusive or toxic relationships.
In addition to being a therapist, I am also an artist, a music lover, hiker, cat/dog cuddler, meditator, and love learning new skills. I’m particularly fond of DIY projects and am no stranger to power tools and generally making messes. I consider myself a lifelong learner, both professionally and personally.
My Philosophy
I try to meet everyone in my counselling room as a real person in a genuine human interaction. I aim to be my authentic self in the counselling space, to support my clients to feel more safe to be their genuine selves in the room as well. And I take care to view every individual that I support as a whole human being, not just as a summation of their problems.
I believe the ultimate goal of therapy is to build our capacity to live more fully and more freely. Sometimes that means shedding layers of pain to reveal who we are more authentically. It can also mean building up sets of skills to manage the chaos of life more effectively. When we can learn to recognize what we can change, and what we can’t, we can build the skills to live more freely and fully within our capacity. And while therapy can’t always remove the pain from life, we can learn to live more skillfully, so that the pain of life doesn't drag us down as hard, or for as long. Therapy can help us to become better connected to ourselves, and our loved ones, and learn to grow from our challenges instead of succumbing to them.
How I work
My goal as a therapist is to meet every person, where they are at. Everyone is different and has different needs, and there is no cookie cutter approach to therapy or healing. I have training in a number of treatment modalities, including EMDR, internal family systems (IFS), art therapy, mindfulness-based, dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), somatic or body centred-approaches, sensory-motor, spiritually integrated psychotherapy… etc, and pull from a variety of these techniques when we work together, depending on your individual needs and goals.
We work collaboratively to decide on goals and approaches that work for you. And we adjust together when those goals and situations change. You are always in the driver seat.
Book a consultation or a session now to start (or continue!) your healing journey.
Why Wild Light
The name Wild Light comes partly from my love of nature, inspired by the image of light shining wildly through a canopy of trees. The rays squeeze through the gaps, illuminating the horizon and making it infinitely more beautiful and interesting. It brings sparkle and growth to anything that it touches. Wild Light doesn’t travel in straight lines, it is not linear, it bounces and careens off surfaces. It moves through the cracks, escaping even the darkest containers. Light in the wild is affected by its surroundings, but remains also unfettered. Therapy at its core is often a pursuit of an unfettered self, like this unfettered light. A self that is bright and can navigate any obstacles with ease.
We need light to thrive. In therapy, I think of the ways light comes both from outside and within us. At times the therapy process is about finding better sources of light, better communities, supports, relationships, skills and self care practices to fuel and nurture us. At times it’s about uncovering our own internal light that may have been clouded or dimmed over the years of stress, trauma, abuse or unhelpful patterns. At times our light can feel lost to us because in the process of merely surviving, we lose touch with our capacity to thrive.
Wild Light communicates for me the essence of aliveness, and the essence of building a life worth living, and fully inhabiting it.