About Erin, MACP Candidate 

Erin Lewyk, Intern Counsellor

Imagine sharing your deepest worries, concerns, and experiences with someone who listens non-judgmentally with an open heart and curious mind. Offering a collaborative therapeutic partnership toward healing and growth, Erin helps you navigate the complexities of life’s challenges with empathy, compassion, and unwavering support.

Seeking support takes courage, and Erin is dedicated to creating a safe, trusting counselling environment based on dignity, honesty, and respect for everyone she works with. Fundamentally, Erin believes in every person’s inherent worthiness and innate resilience and that, given the right circumstances, individuals will move toward growth.

Erin’s approach to therapy is integrative and creative, infusing humanistic, experiential, solution-focused, and somatic modalities to support clients in achieving their best hopes and desired outcomes. Sessions are tailored to the client’s needs and preferences, and emphasize the mind-body connection, emotional processing, and rediscovering one’s strengths and skills to gain deeper self-awareness, self-acceptance, insight, and understanding. Erin is passionate about helping clients align with their values and reconnect to what is most meaningful in their lives. She is also dedicated to counselling with humility and curiosity while keen to explore life’s big questions involving meaning and purpose.

Erin specializes in working in the following areas:

Trauma: Using a holistic approach with a trauma-informed lens, Erin honours her client’s physical, psychological, and emotional safety while encouraging client autonomy, agency, control, and empowerment. She aims to help clients give voice to their unspoken truths to support re-connection with self and with others by safely processing painful experiences and distressing memories. Erin emphasizes developing an authentic therapeutic relationship so that clients feel seen, heard, and understood as she supports them to move forward and thrive in life. 

Eating Disorders/Disordered Eating: Erin will help you explore factors which often underlie binge eating and restrictive or avoidant eating patterns, such as perfectionism, low self-worth/self-esteem, control, and struggles with body image. Challenging the diet mentality and moving toward intuitive eating and body positivity is complex and takes hard work, and Erin is ready to support you along your journey to food freedom and developing a new appreciation for your body.

Sports Performance: As a competitive athlete, Erin is passionate about supporting clients with performance anxiety, injury-related worry, and mental blocks to achieve optimal sports performance and well-being. She can also support you with topics such as “Who am I?” outside of being an athlete. Erin will help navigate your concerns, empowering you to move forward with courage and a deep belief in yourself for your training, competitions, and start lines.

Women’s Mental Health: Women often experience societal pressures and expectations based on traditional gender roles, and Erin considers the intersectionality of gender, culture, identity development, and self-concept to support women in navigating life’s challenges.

Approaches: Person-Centered Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Experiential Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), Existential Philosophy, and Mindfulness.

Populations: Youth (12+), Adults, Elders, Athletes.

Specializations: Women’s Mental Health, Anxiety, Depression, Overwhelm/Stress, Grief and Bereavement, Life Transitions, Sports Psychology, Eating-Related Concerns, Relationships, Shame, Guilt, Self-Worth, Meaning and Purpose, and Trauma.

Educational Background: Erin is completing her Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology from Yorkville University and working towards her Registered Clinical Counsellor designation. Erin is originally from Edmonton, where she earned a Physical Education and Recreation Degree from the University of Alberta. She has 15 years of experience in meditation and breathwork study, training, and teaching and incorporates mindfulness-based approaches to support her clients with emotional regulation and coping strategies.

Beyond the Work: In Erin’s spare time, she enjoys spending time with her partner, Dan, connecting with friends, reading books, and listening to music and podcasts. As a 6-time Ironman triathlon finisher, Erin has a passion for sport and continues to run, play tennis, and race her road bike.

“It’s not perfection we must seek, but freedom of the heart.” – Jack Kornfield  

“When I let go of who I am, I become who I might be.” – Lao Tzu

“The things that make me different are the things that make me, me.” – Piglet (Winnie the Pooh)