Annie DeRuyte

Understanding how your inner system operates can help with increasing your self-compassion, recognizing your strengths, and sitting with your struggles. Discovery of the self is a good basis for healing. It can help to validate and understand your lived experience and contextualizes how you respond to the world and your triggers. Whether you have experienced individual, communal, or societal trauma, your experiences have come to inform how your System operates. Together in therapy, we can work to understand yourself better within the context of your unique and brilliant life.

A little about me:

• I have a Master of Social Work, a Bachelor of Social Work and Bachelor of Arts (specializing in Social Development Studies), as well as a Social Service Worker Diploma.

• I have a deep passion in working with people in the LGBTQ2S+ community, as well as people who have experienced trauma, and those who have Dissociative Identity (DID). I also value working with those who are neurodivergent, in Polyamorous/ENM communities, as well as those who are sex and pleasure positive.

• I recognize that many of these communities have come in contact with harmful systems under the guise of “Social Work”. Systems such as child welfare, prisons, forced hospital stays, and social assistance programs can cause great harm to community members. Your experiences of harm and frustration in these systems will always be validated.

• In my free time I love to be creative with art, play board games and RPGs (Pathfinder and DnD are my favorites!), and read Tarot cards. I haved lived experience as a working professional in the creative arts of floral design, visual arts (acrylics and digital) and musical theatre. While my professional involvement in these arts has passed, I enjoy immersing myself in theatre culture and continue to paint for my soul's delight.

• I love to work from an artistic approach, and love using alternative therapy styles that deviate from Westernized therapy modalities.

  As a non-indigenous white settler descendent, I live and work on the land of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Hatiwendaronk, Chonnonton, Mississauga and Wendat peoples. This territory (known colonially as Niagara) has been my home for 10 years, and it is my duty to be a co-resistor against colonial projects with the indigenous peoples and stewards of this land. Part of my journey of understanding the colonization of this land is the way in which Social Work and Therapy are complicit in upholding ideals of white supremacy. Colonized traditions of therapy enforce a medical hierarchy, where there is a power-imbalance between those who pay for, and those who are paid for mental health services. I commit to greater learning to further politicize my mental health lens, to resist against colonial ways of thinking and medical structures that harm people.

  Things to know about our therapy sessions:

• I understand there is no singular narrative around being queer: our experience of queerness is a multiple in itself! There are no expectations in how you present in therapy. Together in session we will creating space for the exploration of queer identity and community, reaffirming our need to feel expressive and legitimate in our identity

• I will witness all expressions of human emotion without judgement (hurt, anger, sadness, love and joy).

• I will experience therapy with you in the context of your whole life—you are a wholesome, authentic person.

• I will co-resist with you against systems of oppression.

• I value and encourage all parts of you to be present in session (ex. religious parts, protective parts, injured parts and child-like parts). We will create space where all of these parts of you are validated.

• I acknowledge the dark parts of life and human experience. Your therapy will not be simply “live, laugh, love”. While there is always room in our space to celebrate, there will always be space to appreciate all facets of your experience.

My desire for human connection drove me to social work, and I can’t wait to connect with you! I will always bring my whole self to therapy and walk with you on this journey of self-understanding.

To get to know me more, you can book a free 15-minute online or phone consultation using our online booking system, or by contacting me via email.

Session Fee: $180 per 50-minute session. As a Registered Social Worker, my services are GST and HST exempt.