Venus (Pui Yan) Wong

Counselling Intern · Incourage Institute

• Grief, loss and bereavement
• Betrayal and intergenerational trauma
• Anxiety and depression
• Adults and older adults
• English, Cantonese, Mandarin

Grief, loss, and betrayal rarely keep to the schedule people expect of them. You offered your best. You made the best decision you could, at the time you could make it, and things still fell apart, sometimes in silence, sometimes in ways that leave you feeling you have no right to ask for help.

How I work

Sometimes it shows up as a mind rehearsing disasters that haven’t happened yet. Sometimes as a flatness, where the things that used to matter simply don’t anymore. The people around you may say they are there for you, that it’s all right to cry or be angry; just don’t stay there too long. Come back to your normal life when you’re ready.

And then there’s the other kind: the tensing and bracing your body learned in a house where certain things were never spoken aloud, where chaos felt one wrong moment away, where nobody announced the rules but everyone obeyed them just to keep the peace. That kind of knowing gets handed down like an heirloom nobody asked for.

The truth is that life offers no formula, and no timeline, for moving through grief, loss, or betrayal. Sometimes what’s needed most is simply to be seen, to have another person help you co-regulate, to ride the waves rather than be pulled under them. By learning the language your emotions speak through your body, you can develop a new way of staying attuned to your internal signals, of creating an intentional pause, of remembering that you have a choice, even in the most difficult moments.

There is a Japanese art called Kintsugi: broken pottery repaired with seams of gold, so the fracture lines become the most beautiful part of the piece, not despite the break, but because of it. I don’t believe healing means being restored to who you were before. Something happened to you. It shows. That doesn’t make you damaged. It makes you someone who has lived through something real.

Background

Before training as a counsellor, I spent over a decade teaching and directing mental health curricula at the University of Hong Kong, where I remain an Honorary Assistant Professor. I’m also a Certified Therapeutic Musician: since 2023 I’ve played harp at bedsides in hospice and grief care across the Lower Mainland. Sitting with people in their final days, and with the families left in the quiet afterward, has taught me more about presence than any classroom could.

Education

• Master of Counselling (in progress), City University, Vancouver campus
• Counselling in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin
• Practising under the supervision of the Incourage Counselling clinical team
• PhD, Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong
• Master of Social Sciences (Behavioral Health), University of Hong Kong
• MBCT for Life Teacher Training, Oxford Mindfulness Foundation