Individual Psychotherapy
What brings people to therapy?
You don’t need a diagnosis—or a clear explanation of what is wrong—to begin therapy. You may be facing a particular difficulty, or simply sense that the life you are living no longer feels like your own.
People seek my support for concerns including:
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Anxiety and persistent worry
Are you your own worst critic, beating up on yourself for the smallest perceived failure?
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Depression and disconnection
Persistent sadness, emptiness, loss of motivation, or feeling distant from people and activities that once mattered.
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Trauma and painful early experiences
Finding yourself overwhelmed, guarded, shut down, or reacting to present situations with feelings that seem rooted in the past.
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Attachment and relationship difficulties
Fearing abandonment, struggling to trust, withdrawing from closeness, or repeatedly losing yourself in relationships.
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People-pleasing and boundaries
Saying yes when you mean no, putting others’ needs ahead of your own, or feeling guilty when you disappoint someone.
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Shame, self-criticism, and perfectionism
Feeling inadequate, believing you must earn love, or struggling under relentless expectations of yourself.
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Grief, loss, and life transitions
Navigating bereavement, separation, aging, changes in identity, or the ending of a life you expected to have.
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Integrating psychedelic experiences
Making sense of a psychedelic experience, working through difficult feelings or confusion afterward, and bringing what you experienced into your everyday choices, relationships, and way of living.
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Questions of identity and meaning
Wondering who you are beyond your roles and responsibilities, what you want, and how to live more honestly.
Whatever brings you here, we begin with your experience.
Together, we explore what hurts, the patterns that keep repeating,
and the changes you want to make.
How I approach psychotherapy
I approach therapy with curiosity about your life, your relationships, and what you have had to do to find love, safety, and belonging.
Early in life, we were forced to adapt to the conditions around us. We may learn to please, achieve, hide our feelings, anticipate others’ needs, or avoid closeness. These responses make sense in the circumstances in which they develop. Yet what once protected us can eventually limit our ability to live freely and form satisfying relationships.
What helped us survive early in life, may now be getting in the way of living our most authentic life. In our work together, we explore how these adaptations are now limiting your full self-expression.
We bring awareness and compassion to these patterns. As you begin to recognize the beliefs and fears organizing your reactions, you can discover more room to choose how you respond.
The relationship between us is central to this work. It offers a place to speak honestly, notice what feels difficult to reveal, and experience what happens when more of who you are is welcomed into relationship.
In my work, I treat you as a person, and not as any diagnosis you may have received in the past. I want to understand you as a person—and support your capacity to live with greater self-trust, connection, and freedom. Together we make space for your true self to emerge.
The Heart Self
The Heart Self is my name for the person you are beneath the identity you learned to maintain to feel safe, accepted, or loved.
You may recognize it in moments when you speak honestly without rehearsing, feel compassion without abandoning your own needs, or trust yourself enough to make a difficult choice. There is room for tenderness and anger, grief and joy, closeness and independence.
Much of our suffering arises when the beliefs and strategies we developed to survive become the boundaries of who we believe we can be. We may become so accustomed to earning approval, avoiding conflict, or hiding vulnerability that we lose touch with our own desires and sense of direction.
In therapy, we meet these protective patterns with awareness and compassion. As their grip loosens, you can begin to experience yourself more fully and bring more of yourself into your relationships.
Living from the Heart Self does not mean being calm, loving, or certain all the time. It means having greater freedom to feel what you feel, know what matters to you, and act with honesty, courage, and care.
“The false self is for survival.
The true self is for life”
(Andrew Feldmar)
“The false self is for survival. The true self is for life”
(Andrew Feldmar)
Hello, my name is Bruce Sanguin
I don’t work from a fixed method or map.
I pay close attention to what is arising in you—and between us—because that’s where the truth of your life reveals itself.
Most of what gets in the way of living your own life was formed early. When love felt uncertain, or conditional, you adapted. You learned to shape yourself around others—to be who you needed to be in order to belong.
That adaptation often becomes what we call the “self.”
But it’s not your truest self. It’s a strategy.
In our work, we bring that strategy into awareness—not to judge it, but to understand it. And as it becomes conscious, something else begins to emerge.
What I call the Heart Self.
Not a fixed identity, but a living, unfolding way of being—
more honest, more grounded, less driven by fear of disconnection.
The therapy relationship becomes the place where this shift happens in real time.
From self-protection…
to self-expression.
Individual Psychotherapy FAQ
You can talk about anything that feels important, confusing, painful, unresolved, or alive for you. Some people come to therapy with a clear issue or crisis, while others arrive with a more general sense of feeling stuck, disconnected, anxious, overwhelmed, or unable to fully be themselves. Therapy is a space to explore your relationships, emotions, patterns, fears, desires, past experiences, and the deeper questions of who you are and how you want to live. There is no “right” place to begin — we start wherever you are.
Virtual psychotherapy
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Based in Bowen Island BC, I provide virtual therapy for clients via Zoom.
- Toronto, Ontario
- Montreal, Quebec
- Vancouver, British Columbia
- Calgary, Alberta
- Edmonton, Alberta
- Ottawa-Gatineau, Ontario/Quebec
- Winnipeg, Manitoba
- Quebec City, Quebec
- Hamilton, Ontario
- Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, Ontario
Out Now!
The Goodness Trap:
How to End People-Pleasing and Live Your Own Heart-Centred Life
This book describes how to end the people-pleasing identity and shift into your true, heart-centred self.
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