9426 51 Ave NW Suite 201,
Edmonton, AB T6E 5A6
hello@abnerbrownpsychology.ca
How I Work
Many people find themselves feeling stuck in emotional patterns that seem to prevent them from moving forward or taking action in their lives. These patterns can bring up stressful and critical thoughts that influence our behaviours and reinforce the emotional patterns.
I work from a therapeutic stance that our emotional, behavioural and thought patterns are developed and influenced by our environments and life circumstances. All contributing to produce unique and individual experiences.
That’s why I work from an integrative approach – depending on your goals I will draw on a range of evidence-based, psychological theories of change, that matches your experience and support pattern changes through clarifying your values and focusing on behavioural change.
Therapeutic Styles Used in Counselling
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is an evidence-based approach that helps people build a healthier relationship with their thoughts and feelings, rather than trying to eliminate or control them. Instead of treating difficult emotions as problems to be fixed, ACT teaches you to make room for them while still moving toward the things that matter most in your life. The name captures the core idea: accept what is out of your personal control, and commit to action that improves and enriches your life.
A lot of suffering comes not from pain itself, but from struggling against it. We chase happiness by trying to avoid sadness, push away anxiety, or suppress unwanted thoughts—and often that struggle backfires, making the original problem bigger or more exhausting.
ACT takes a different approach. Rather than asking “How do I get rid of this feeling?” it asks “How do I live a meaningful life, even with this feeling present?” This shift can feel surprising at first, but many people find it freeing: you stop fighting an unwinnable battle and start putting your energy toward what actually matters to you.
Narrative Therapy
We all make sense of our experiences through stories. Some of these stories help us; others can box us in, especially when they’re saturated with problems like “I’m a failure” or “I’ll always be anxious.” Narrative Therapy helps you examine these stories, notice the ones that aren’t serving you, and begin to author new ones that better reflect your strengths, values, and hopes
Narrative Therapy is an approach built on a simple but powerful idea: you are not the problem—the problem is the problem. Rather than viewing struggles as flaws or permanent parts of who you are, this approach treats them as separate from your identity, shaped by the stories you’ve come to tell about your life.
Problems often grow more powerful when we see them as fixed traits—”I am depressed,” “I am a worrier,” “I am broken.” Narrative Therapy gently shifts this language and thinking. Instead of “I am depressed,” the conversation might explore “depression has been showing up in your life”—a subtle but meaningful difference that opens up space between you and the problem
Narrative Therapy isn’t about denying that problems are real or minimizing their impact—it means examining it without collapsing your entire identity into it. It’s also not about rewriting your history to be falsely positive; it’s about telling a fuller, more honest story that includes your resilience and resourcefulness alongside your struggles.
Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) Skills
*NOTE: I use DBT SKILLS, I do not use the full comprehensive structured DBT protocol
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy is evidence-based approach to help people experiencing intense, overwhelming emotions and self-destructive patterns. DBT combines practical, skills-based strategies with acceptance-based practices like mindfulness, helping people build a life worth living—even amid real pain and difficulty.
Many people who seek out DBT have struggled with emotions that feel too big, too fast, or too overwhelming to manage—along with reactions or coping strategies (like self-harm, substance use, or relationship conflict) that bring short-term relief but long-term harm.
DBT teaches that you can fully accept yourself and your circumstances as they are right now, while also working hard to change and grow. Your reactions make sense given your history and circumstances, and you can learn new skills to respond differently going forward
Emotionally Focused Therapy (Attachment Theory)
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy is an evidence-based approach that applies the principles of Emotionally Focused Therapy—originally developed for couples—to individual work. It’s grounded in attachment theory: the idea that humans are wired to seek close, secure emotional bonds, and that much of our distress comes from disrupted or insecure attachment patterns, whether from childhood, past relationships, or current ones.
The goal is to help you understand your emotional patterns, process the feelings beneath them, and build a stronger, more secure relationship with yourself and the people in your life. Many of us get stuck in repeating emotional patterns: shutting down when we feel vulnerable, chasing reassurance, avoiding closeness, or reacting to small triggers with outsized fear or anger. On the surface, these patterns can look like “just who I am” or chalked up to stress, anxiety, or a difficult personality. Underneath, they’re often rooted in deeper fears formed by past experience: “Am I safe?” “Am I enough?” “Can I count on others—or myself?”
EFIT works from the premise that these patterns made sense as ways of coping and protecting yourself, even when they now cause pain. By identifying and naming your emotional patterns, and the vulnerable feelings underneath them, you can begin to relate to yourself differently and build new, healthier ways of responding to your own needs and to others
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is an evidence-based therapy originally developed to treat trauma and post-traumatic stress, and now used for a much wider range of concerns. Unlike many talk therapies, EMDR doesn’t require you to describe a difficult memory in great detail or analyze it extensively. Instead, it uses structured sets of bilateral stimulation—typically guided eye movements, but sometimes alternating taps or sounds—while you briefly focus on the memory, helping your brain reprocess it in a way that reduces its emotional charge.
When something distressing or overwhelming happens, the brain sometimes struggles to fully process the experience and file it away as a resolved memory. Instead, the memory can get “stuck,” along with the original emotions, body sensations, and beliefs attached to it (like “I’m not safe” or “It was my fault”). Later, something in the present—a sound, a situation, a feeling—can trigger that stuck memory, and the brain reacts as if the danger is happening now.
EMDR is based on the idea that the brain has a natural capacity to heal, similar to how the body heals a physical wound, but this process can get blocked by trauma. Bilateral stimulation appears to help unlock that natural processing, allowing the memory to move toward resolution—still remembered, but without the same intensity or grip.
Nervous System Regulation with Somatic Exercises
Nervous system regulation refers to the body’s ability to move fluidly between states of activation and rest—to rise to meet a challenge, and then return to a calm, grounded baseline once the challenge has passed. When we’re well-regulated, we can handle stress without being overwhelmed, feel our emotions without being consumed by them, and connect with others without shutting down or becoming reactive.
For many people, this natural rhythm has been disrupted—by trauma, chronic stress, early experiences, or the pace of modern life. The nervous system gets stuck in patterns of chronic activation (always on edge, anxious, or hypervigilant) or chronic shutdown (numb, exhausted, disconnected)
“Top-down” approaches to healing: using the thinking mind through talk, insight, or reframing to influence how we feel. Thinking your way out of a nervous system state has real limits when the nervous system is highly activated or shut down, the thinking brain goes partly offline. “Bottom-up” regulation works in the opposite direction: starting with the body, breath, movement, and sensation, and working upward toward the thinking mind. By directly influencing the nervous system through physical means, we can shift the body’s state first, making reflection, connection, and insight more accessible. The body leads and the mind follows.
Monday : 2pm – 9pm
Thursday: 2pm – 9pm
Friday: 9am – 5pm
Saturday: 10am – 3pm
9426 51 Ave NW Suite 201,
Edmonton, AB T6E 5A6