Sena Tay

My name is Sena, and I am glad you found your way here. I genuinely hope you come to feel that you’ve arrived somewhere that can help.

I came to this work carrying my own experience of navigating between worlds. As a first-generation Canadian, I grew up managing the particular tension of holding multiple identities at once — balancing cultural expectations with personal ones, understanding when to adapt and when to hold your ground, sitting with the loneliness of challenges that people around you may not have language for. That experience is not separate from how I practice. It shapes everything: how I understand identity, how I approach difference, and what I believe it means to ask for help when that’s not something your community makes easy.

I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology with a minor in Criminology and am completing my Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology at Yorkville University. My professional background is deliberately varied — I have worked as a middle school teacher, in youth custody settings, with adults in residential rehabilitation, and with refugees navigating resettlement. Each of those contexts has deepened my understanding of how differently people experience hardship, what resilience actually looks like under pressure, and how much context matters when you’re trying to understand a person’s life.

I work with individuals across a broad range of concerns: trauma and its long aftermath, anxiety and depression, relationship difficulties, grief, the accumulated stress of lives that ask too much. I have a particular interest in supporting culturally diverse clients — including newcomers and fellow first-generation Canadians — who are navigating identity, family pressure, isolation, and the particular exhaustion that comes from living between expectations. The constant demands of modern life — the difficulty of switching off, the pressure to keep pace — often layers on top of these deeper strains, and I hold space for both.

My approach is trauma-informed, culturally sensitive, and genuinely client-centred. I draw from Emotion-Focused Therapy, CBT, Psychodynamic approaches, Solution-Focused methods, Mindfulness, and Humanistic frameworks — not as a fixed toolkit, but as a range of possibilities that I adapt to what you actually need. I offer both in-person and secure virtual sessions.

The first step tends to be the hardest. I look forward to hearing from you.