Before we begin, a little about me.
I help parents reconnect with their own strengths and thrive in this season of their lives.
Heather Young
MSW · RSW · PMH-C
Registered Social Worker · Perinatal Mental Health Certified
In person in St. Agatha · Virtual across Ontario
I’m a Registered Social Worker and a Perinatal Mental Health Certified therapist, and I’ve spent more than twenty years working with families: in community settings, in hospitals, and, for almost the last decade, in my own private practice.
These days my work centres on parents: the season when parenthood is both more wonderful and more disorienting than you pictured, when the joys and the struggles arrive in the same week. The work I do is about helping you flourish inside that complexity, not push past it. I help with what is happening underneath the parenting, not only the parenting itself.
I come to this work as a clinician and as a parent who has been through her own version of the hard part. That combination, the training and the lived understanding, is the heart of how I show up in the room with you.
All experiences are welcome here.
Becoming a parent opened me up in ways I never expected.
I had built a life on the idea that if I worked hard enough, things would come together. Then I had my children, and so much of what I expected to come naturally simply did not. My sense of who I was, my confidence, my footing, all of it shifted, and it took me a long time to find solid ground again.
The early years with my boys were some of the hardest of my life. I was not sleeping, I did not feel like myself, and I felt things, including an anger that was new to me, that I had not expected and did not know what to do with. What helped, in the end, was not advice. It was the slow work of understanding myself, accepting support, and learning to meet my own hardest parts with some kindness. Inside the struggle was something I would not have found any other way: a wider version of myself, mirrored back through my kids.
I would not give those years back. Not because they were easy, they were not, but because of who I became inside them.
I work with parents the way I wish someone had worked with me back then. Without scripts. Without shame. Starting from the assumption that what you are feeling makes sense. Parenthood is hard, and parenthood, if we let it, is transformative. The two are not in conflict.
What it’s actually like to work with you.
My work is shaped around three things our nervous systems need in order to feel safe enough to change: context, connection, and choice. We go slowly, on purpose, because going slowly is what lets the deeper work actually hold.
Context
Before we change anything, we make sense of it. So much of what feels like personal failure is a perfectly understandable response to your history, your circumstances, and the load you are actually carrying. We start by understanding the whole picture, not just the symptom.
Connection
The relationship between us is where the work begins, and the connection you build with yourself is where the real healing lands. I lead with reflective listening, validation, and a pace that follows you. As your nervous system finds steadiness in the room with mine, you begin to find it on your own. Co-regulation is part of how that bridge gets built.
Choice
You stay in the driver’s seat. I will offer perspective, gentle direction, and honest input, and you decide what fits and what does not. Therapy with me is something we do together, not something done to you.
Underneath that, I draw on a range of evidence-based approaches, Internal Family Systems, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Trauma-Informed and attachment-aware work, mindfulness, through a feminist lens. I do not believe one model fits every person. I bring what each session, and each parent, actually needs.
Training, credentials, and experience.
It matters that you feel confident in your therapist’s training, not only in the room with them. Here is the background I bring, and the work I have done to be ready for yours.
I’ve wanted to do this work since I was in high school. More than twenty years into my career, I am still reading something new for my clients almost every day.
What sets this work apart
Plenty of therapists support parents. What I have built is depth in this specific season of life, the perinatal years and the parenting years that follow, so you are not explaining the basics before you can get to the real thing.
- Perinatal Mental Health Certified (PMH-C)Advanced, current training in postpartum depression, anxiety, and birth trauma, the season most therapists are not specifically trained for.
- More than twenty years with familiesAcross women’s health, child protection, and oncology, long before private practice.
- Both a therapist and a certified child sleep consultantTwo ways into the same goal: a family that is rested, steadier, and more themselves.
- A clinician who has lived itI have been through my own hard version of early parenthood, and it informs how I show up in yours.
Specialised training
Master of Social Work (MSW)
University of Toronto, 2003
My clinical foundation, and the start of more than two decades working alongside families.
Perinatal Mental Health Certification (PMH-C)
Postpartum Support International, 2023
Specialised certification in perinatal mood and anxiety, with continuing education required every two years to keep it current.
Child Sleep Consultant
Family Sleep Institute, 2017
Formal training in attuned, family-centred sleep support, often the first relief a depleted parent feels.
Foundations and ongoing training
- Internal Family Systems (IFS)
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
- Polyvagal-informed practice
- Attachment theory
- Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
- Mindful Self-Compassion
- Narrative therapy
- Women’s Reproductive Mental Health
- Counselling for Infertility, Loss & Assisted Reproductive Technologies
- Grief and Bereavement
- Child Development
Areas I work with
Perinatal mental health
From pregnancy through your child’s earliest years: anxiety, depression, intrusive thoughts, identity shifts, and the losses that sometimes shape the road here.
Parenting, at every stage
One-on-one therapy for parents in the slow accumulation of hard: the rage, the burnout, the mental load, the sense you are not yourself anymore.
Relationships and support
Two-parent sessions for couples and co-parents working a specific issue together, including the particular weight of parenting without a village.
Child sleep consulting
A real, family-specific sleep plan for children over 4 months, plus the support and reassurance to follow through with it.
The rest of a whole life
Adults navigating anxiety or depression, grief and bereavement, or a life transition that is asking who you are now: parenthood does not have to be part of it.
Most of my steadiest ideas arrive under trees.
I live in a forest in southern Ontario with my husband, our two teenage boys, and a dog who turns up in a good number of the photos on this site. I enjoy walking not only among the trees, but near shores as well. There is something expansive about nature that I find so inspiring.
I am an introverted extrovert: I need my people, and I need quiet blocks of time to refill on my own. I love movement, the freedom of running and the restoration of yoga, and I am a lifelong learner who almost always has a book on the go. I look for ways to take myself a little less seriously and to notice the good that is genuinely there.
I do my own work, too. I am in therapy myself, because staying grounded for the people across from me starts with me.
Ready to start a conversation?
Every new client starts with a free 15-minute phone call. We talk about what is going on, what you are hoping for, and whether we are the right fit. No paperwork. No pressure.