I am so glad you're here. I look forward to getting know you each other better over time.

Ámham — Ucwalmícwts for “to make something better” — is Alanah’s counselling, consulting, and facilitation practice. Ámham’s work is grounded in cultural humility, anti-oppressive practice, and an awareness of the larger social and historical contexts that shape people’s lives. Alanah brings together Indigenous, relational, land-based and spiritual understandings of healing with clinical training in trauma, psychotherapy, community health, and expressive and body-based approaches.

Alanah is a St'at'imc woman with Indigenous(St'at'imc,) European(Scottish/English/Scandinavian/Russian) and African (Nigerian) ancestors. She is registered social worker-psychotherapist/counsellor/facilitator/creative/educator who works collaboratively with people, relationships, communities, and organizations. Relationship is central to her work. She aims to create a grounded, steady and respectful space where people can explore what is difficult while enhancing connections to their strengths, supports, community, land, and sense of self. Her approach is guided by curiosity, humility, and respect for each person’s own knowledge, beliefs, values, culture, and ways of making meaning.

Alanah has specific training and clinical skills in treating trauma and its impacts, while recognizing that people are more than what has happened to them. Her work pays attention to both individual experience and the larger picture — including relationships, family, community, culture, racism, colonialism, gender, social conditions, and other systems that can shape how people understand themselves and move through the world.

Alanah adapts her approach to the person or group in front of her. At times the work may lean strongly into culture, land, spirituality, or ceremony. At other times these may remain more in the background while the work draws more heavily on body-based and somatic approaches, Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Therapy, parts work/IFS, expressive and play-based approaches, story and narrative, or other therapeutic tools. Creativity, humour, playfulness, and moments of lightness can be important parts of the work.

Alanah’s cultural and spiritual grounding has developed through relationships, teachings, land, and lived experience. These foundations shape how she understands healing, while each person’s own beliefs, values, and ways of making meaning guide how culture and spirituality enter the work. Ceremony in alignment with the client's desires may also emerge as a meaningful part of work around grief, transition, and reconnection.

Alanah often thinks about her approach through the image of water: joining the flow of each person’s river of life, meeting them where they are, and helping them navigate what has shaped the waters they are moving through. The work may involve understanding the stories, experiences, relationships, histories, and systems that have influenced their lives, reconnecting with parts of themselves that have become distant or protected, and developing greater capacity to move forward in ways that feel more intentional and connected.

Change is something that can occur naturally and intentionally through understanding, reconnection, awareness, relationship, and choice. She works at a pace that supports enough safety to explore what matters while keeping an eye toward the strengths, resourcefulness, adaptability, connection, and capacities that already exist within people and communities.

This same approach carries into Alanah’s consulting and facilitation work. She brings together lived experience, Indigenous perspectives, trauma knowledge, Western clinical approaches, and systems thinking to help organizations and communities understand complex issues in practical and human ways. Her work can support organizations in creating healthier and more culturally responsive environments while also challenging hierarchical and colonial ways of understanding care, leadership, learning, and relationship.

Alanah holds a BSc, MSc in Community Health Sciences, and MSW with a focus on Indigenous trauma and resiliency. Across her work, she brings together the individual and the wider context, creating space for healing, growth, understanding, reconnection, and meaningful change.