I came to this work the long way round
Infantry, then trades, then nine years of ministry, most of it on the street. The training came after, because the people in front of me had run out of what I knew.
I came to this work the long way round
A short 15-minute call to discuss your goals, no commitment.
Professional Credentials
Education & Training
- Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology (MACP), Yorkville University, 2025
- Master of Divinity (MDiv), Carey College, 2022
- Diploma in Professional Counselling (DPC), Pacific Life Bible College, 2012
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- Specialized training in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, Narrative Therapy, ACT, Mindfulness interventions, and Family Systems Theory
Professional Status
- Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC)
- CCPA Member #11252849
- Extended health insurance billing available
Experience
- Nine years pastoral ministry: church planting in Victoria (2013-2016), now The House of Shiloh; then pastoral counselling and crisis intervention at The Mustard Seed Street Church (2016-2022)
- Canadian Armed Forces infantry service (2001-2005)
- Plumbing business owner serving Victoria, Nanaimo, and Vancouver (2022-2026)
My Story
Soldier. Plumber. Street pastor. Counsellor came fourth.
The first three taught me the same thing in three different accents. A stained ceiling has its leak three rooms away. A bagged lunch handed to someone on the street was never really about lunch. And someone still watching the doors years after the danger passed is not being stubborn.
What is in the room is rarely what is wrong.
I did not plan to end up here. In 2011 I got my plumbing ticket. In the trades that is supposed to be the end of the story: you get your ticket, you get your truck, you are set.
The full story behind this practice
What Actually Helps People Change?
By 2011 I was a licensed plumber, and a street ministry I ran downtown was going well. Both were working. That is worth saying, because it means nothing was pushing me out.
One night I knelt down to pray and decided I was not getting up until I had an answer about what to do with my life. I came away with two words and a distinction I have never quite got over. Study counselling. Not be a counsellor. Study it.
I offer that as what it is, the meaning I made of a night on my knees, not a mechanism I can hand anybody. You do not have to share any of it to work with me; I include it because leaving it out would make a tidier story and a less honest one.
Acting on it cost something. No prerequisites. No tuition money. Nowhere to live. One month before term started. I did not have a plan; I had a strong feeling and a ticket I was about to stop using. I went.
I have taken that night back to God more than once since, usually in the tone of: this was your idea. Twelve years of school followed, none of it full time, all of it fitted around work. That is long enough to find out whether you actually wanted it.
A diploma in 2012, a Master of Divinity in 2022, a Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology in 2025. I have not stopped since.
Everything the tuition eventually paid for, I had to learn again on a sidewalk.
The community I served downtown had been helped at so many times it had all turned to static. Every week another person who felt called to help turned up with bagged lunches and a tract. These were people who had been let down so often they had gone cynical about the whole idea, and nothing anyone said landed until they had been shown up for, week after week, long enough to be believed. After that, a word at the right moment could do what a thousand right words could not.
That turns out to be as true in an office as it is on a sidewalk. Trust comes before the message. Not as a courtesy. As a precondition.
The rest is mechanics, and the mechanics matter. Distress does not sit in one place. It sits in what a person thinks, and in a body still braced years after the danger has gone, and in who they can stand to be close to, and in whether any of it means anything. Work on the thinking alone and the body keeps pulling the alarm. Work on the mechanics alone and you can be entirely correct about someone’s life and still miss the part that hurts.
The Foundation: Lived Experience
Three things shaped how I work before I ever opened a textbook. Infantry. Trades, and a business of my own. And nine years of ministry, most of it street-level crisis. I also carry lived experience with PTSD. None of that is background; it is the equipment.
Military and trades (operational stress)
Infantry from 2001 to 2005. Then years on the tools, then my own plumbing business across the Island and the mainland.
Trades teach you what running hard costs. Going quiet. Going numb. Needing nobody at all. Those are real skills, and they work; they work so well that a man can get twenty years down the road on them before anything looks wrong.
Then one day you are home. Nothing is on fire. And the going quiet, the going numb, the needing nobody are all still switched on, with nothing left to guard against.
The same gear that kept you upright is now holding everyone at arm’s length.
That is the common ground I have with a lot of the people I see. Not sympathy from across a desk. I know what it is to believe therapy is for people with more time than me.
There is a part of me that came out of the infantry and the job site and never fully stood down. The fighter. For a long time I treated it as the problem. It is not the problem; it is the reason I got through some of what I got through. What it needed was not exile. It needed supervision, and something to do besides scan.
That is usually the work with people who come to me from those worlds. Not getting rid of the part that kept you alive. Giving it a job that fits the life you have now.
Pastoral leadership and crisis work (9 years)
I planted a church in Victoria in 2013 and led it until 2016. It still meets, under the name The House of Shiloh. From 2016 to 2022 I pastored The Mustard Seed Street Church.
Nine years, and most of what I carry from them is crisis. People sleeping rough. People in withdrawal. Staff burning quietly down to the wick. Families coming apart in the church kitchen. And funerals; more funerals than you expect at that age.
Three things from those years I could not have got from a book.
Change keeps its own schedule, and hurrying it is usually my anxiety wearing a helpful face.
Sitting still beside someone in the worst hour is not what you do until the real intervention arrives. Most of the time it is the intervention.
And when a person asks why this happened to them, they have not asked a clinical question. Answering that with a symptom list is like answering “was it worth it” with a receipt.
Lived understanding of PTSD
I carry lived experience with PTSD.
So I know it from the inside. That the body keeps a watch nobody ever relieves. That braced stops feeling like braced and starts feeling like awake. That the habits which once kept you safe, the scanning, the flat voice, the needing no one, do not switch off when the danger does. They just change what they cost, and start charging it to the people in the next room.
Which is why I do not hurry anyone who tells me they know they are safe and still cannot feel it. Knowing and feeling run on different clocks. That gap is not a failure of effort, and being told to calm down has never once closed it.
The Framework: Clinical & Theological Integration
Two disciplines hold this practice up, and they do different jobs.
Counselling taught me how to love people. Theology taught me what love is.
I have tried taking theology into a hospital room. It does not get you far. What the person in that bed needs is someone who can pull up a chair, stay quiet, and not flinch, and no amount of good doctrine teaches you that.
Which is why you should not have to choose between the evidence and the question that has you awake at three in the morning. Where that meeting point is explicitly Christian, it shapes my Christian counselling work.
Credentials, training, and clinical framework
Clinical Rigour (The “How”)
Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology (MACP), Yorkville University, 2025
Diploma in Professional Counselling (DPC), Pacific Life Bible College, 2012
Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC), CCPA Member #11252849
Focus: Empirical understanding of psychological mechanisms and evidence-based therapeutic frameworks including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), mindfulness-based interventions, pastoral counselling, narrative therapy, and family systems theory.
Existential Depth (The “Why”)
Master of Divinity (MDiv), Carey College, 2022
Nine years pastoral counselling and crisis intervention experience
Focus: Theological and philosophical frameworks for engaging questions of meaning, purpose, suffering, and identity. This training addresses questions that psychology alone cannot adequately answer: suffering that demands meaning-making, loss that requires narrative reconstruction, transitions that involve fundamental identity questions, and the search for purpose beyond symptom reduction.
Who I Work With
Most people arrive with something specific. Anxiety that will not switch off. Trauma that still runs the show. Grief with nowhere to put it. Burnout they have been outrunning for a year without calling it that.
Some also want a counsellor who already knows the shape of their week: veterans and first responders, tradespeople, people in ministry, business owners, and anyone whose work leaves little room for falling apart.
I am not the right fit for everyone, and I would rather say so here than have you find out in session four. A free fifteen-minute call is usually enough for both of us to tell.
Client profiles and service areas
What people come for
- Trauma and PTSD
- Anxiety
- Stress and burnout
- Depression and mood
- Grief and loss
- Intrusive thoughts and rumination
- Relationship patterns, individual work
- Family of origin work
- Spiritual and existential exploration
- Christian counselling
Who tends to find their way here
Veterans and first responders. Tradespeople. Ministers, deacons, and others carrying spiritual leadership. Business owners and leaders. People in high-stress work generally, and current or former faith community members working through spiritual uncertainty or doubt.
The goal is movement past managing symptoms and toward getting your life back: both the mechanics keeping the distress running, and the meaning you are trying to make of it.
Outside the Office
A bit more about me
Whether it’s a walk through one of the trails around the Westshore or just a quiet evening at home, those are the moments that matter most to me. Being a dad has changed how I see almost everything, and it’s made me a better therapist.
I spent a good chunk of my younger years beating up my body playing rugby, football, and training Muay Thai. Eventually my body stopped asking and started telling. The new rule was simple: nothing where the point is impact. These days I channel that energy into trail running, backpacking, and getting out on the water in a kayak. There’s something about being in the backcountry or paddling along the coast that resets things in a way nothing else quite does.
I also play guitar; not well enough to impress anyone, but well enough to enjoy it. It’s one of those things that forces me to slow down and be present, which is probably why I keep coming back to it. My wife and I love to travel when we can; having a kid hasn’t slowed that down so much as shifted what it looks like. We’re figuring that out as we go, like most things in parenting.