Graduate Intern Therapist
Eric Lai
In joining Arbutus Counselling, I am looking forward to helping people feel whole and resilient. Be it a career change or finding your next home, I can appreciate the challenging process that comes with decisions and choices, both large and small.
In our time together, my hope is to help you discover greater self-awareness and confidence in your seek both a satisfying and fulfilling life. This can be sought by discovering and building personalized strength-based skills and strategies.
Despite what life brings us in our personalized box of chocolates, we all have the capacity to grow and transcend beyond what we had once held on to, as well as the things that held onto us.
As a Graduate Intern Therapist who has experienced his own setbacks both small and life changing, I want to be an ally for others who are working through their own journeys of transition, misalignment, and growth while using individualized and client focussed approaches to change. I will strive to create an experience where you can organize your successes, failures, grief and hopes so that you can find your path forward.
In our sessions you can expect kindness, humour, sensitive review, encouragement, genuineness, and professional candour. Counselling is a wonderful decision and strategy but it is most successful when there is a solid “fit” between client and counsellor. I would encourage you to connect for a complimentary consultation with me in order to make that informed choice for yourself.
A few things about ERIC…
For over two decades, my constant commitment has been to support and enrich local and global communities through my work and volunteerism. With a decade of full-time work and service in the Canadian Armed Forces, my empathy and compassion for others has grown enormously. I have also worked “shoulder to shoulder” as a peer support worker to other veterans who have experienced complex injuries through wellness and community initiatives.
In more recent years, I have worked to help others develop healthy relationships to gaming and gambling, which has led to become more attuned to the nuances of being a newer settler, immigrant, children of newer settlers, and people with intersectional identities in the cultural mosaic that is our country.
In all these respects, counselling has naturally emerged as the next appropriate step in extending my passion towards the service of others.
