Danielle Rodrigues Brunetti

MACP, CCC (#11251492) · Associate Counsellor

• Anxiety and low mood
• Trauma
• ADHD in young adults
• Identity and life direction
• Young and emerging adults
• Adlerian psychotherapy

You did what you were supposed to do. The degree, the job, the relationship that looks right when you describe it out loud. And somewhere along the way it stopped being clear whether you chose any of it, or just never objected.

What brings people to me

Sometimes that surfaces as anxiety you can’t trace back to any one thing. Sometimes as a discouragement that arrived so gradually you stopped giving it a name. Underneath it, often, is a question you don’t say out loud: whose life is this, and when exactly did I agree to it?

Often something sits under that in turn. Sometimes it’s trauma: not always a single event, more often a long stretch of managing on your own, which teaches you to read a room before you read yourself. Sometimes it’s ADHD, where starting costs far more than it looks like it should, and years of falling short of your own plans leave a discouragement of their own.

I don’t diagnose ADHD, and you don’t need a diagnosis to work on it. If an assessment would help, I’ll say so and point you to where to get one.

How I work

You don’t have to arrive with it already figured out, and you don’t have to start at the beginning. Bring the version you can say out loud, and we’ll start there.

My work is Adlerian, which in practice means we don’t only catalogue what’s wrong. We look at the patterns you’ve built, the meanings you attached to them, and where those meanings came from, usually long before you had any say in them. Naming a pattern isn’t blaming yourself for it. It’s what turns it into something you can decide about.

I’ll ask about your strengths and your goals as much as your struggles. Not to look on the bright side, because who you’re trying to become usually tells us more about the way through than what hurts does.

What I hope for isn’t only that you leave with new strategies, but with a deeper sense of belonging and possibility, something that stays yours well after our work together ends.

Background

I came to counselling after ten years of work that circled it: supporting children through trauma and grief, including the slow work of helping them tell their own life stories; residential support in a women’s shelter and in community programs; and several years teaching across Thailand, China, Brazil and Ireland. Most of what I understand about people I learned in places where I was the one who didn’t know the rules yet. I completed my master’s with a practicum here at Incourage, which is how I came to join the team.

Education and training

• Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology, Yorkville University
• Bachelor of Arts and Science in Psychology, Brock University
• Practicum training at Incourage Counselling under Nelson Szeto, RCC-ACS
• Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC #11251492), Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association