Of all the living beings, humans have the power to reason. Their innate curiosity and drive to find the reasons for things, events, and even emotions is what truly marks them as different. While it may seem like a simple activity to try and understand things and people around us, it truly isn’t. Sometimes, things are more complex than they seem, especially when it comes to other people, their emotions, and even our own emotions.
Human beings are complex; their emotions, are complicated. At times, we fail to understand, recognize, and handle our own emotions. While this may at times seem just another incident, it may, over time, develop into a phenomenon that can affect every other aspect of our lives. When we fail to understand what we are going through emotionally, it may affect our physical, social, and professional well-being. And in such cases, it is best to see a therapist.
In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, psychotherapy plays a crucial role in promoting mental health and well-being. It emphasizes skill development rather than solely seeking insight into the past. While understanding the “why” behind our emotions and behaviors remains important, practical skills empower individuals to navigate life’s challenges effectively. Psychotherapy provides a safe space for individuals to explore their emotions, behaviors, and perspectives. It offers fresh insights and helps improve mood, treat mental illnesses, and enhance communication and relationships.
As Ann Bayly-Bruneel, a registered psychotherapist at Heartsight Psychotherapy working in the areas of mental health, addiction, and trauma for more than 20 years explains, beyond addressing specific issues, therapy promotes self-esteem, resilience, and overall well-being. By seeking professional guidance, people can overcome depression, cope with loss, and break free from self-destructive patterns.
Helping People Heal
Ann Bayly-Bruneel specializes in supporting individuals, couples, and families who have experienced developmental, complex, and intersectional trauma. She also provides mentorship and support to her peers and colleagues and believes in processes of learning/un-learning and collaboration that uplift each other’s sovereignty, self-agency, and self-leadership.
A Registered Psychotherapist and Art Therapist, Ann’s practice spans both community mental health and private settings. She approaches her work through an embodied, expressive, and trauma-informed framework. This perspective recognizes how various forms of individual and collective oppression shape our lives. She is deeply committed to supporting individuals as they explore the impacts of trauma and violence. In her practice, she creates a safe space where clients can share their vulnerabilities and strengths. Together, they courageously reclaim lost or unrealized aspects of themselves, empowering them to live authentically and fully free lives. Integral to her work is facilitating post-traumatic and transformational growth, restorative well-being, healing justice, and repair.
The formative Years
Ann was a sensitive and playful child who grew up listening to intergenerational stories about her ancestry and family lineage. Being immersed in deep conversations and feelings at a young age cultivated a path of curiosity, compassion, and a desire to understand what wasn’t said. As a child, she would always question the way things were—and became aware that what was not said, was just as important as what was spoken. Her quest to understand always hinged on her own need to unpack and liberate herself from her own social conditioning that was restrictive.
She was drawn to study Psychology and Fine Art at the University of Guelph which helped her recognize the interconnections between our mind, body, and spirit. She later pursued her master ‘s-level training in Art Therapy in Vancouver; BC to further hone her intuition, creativity, and capacity to deeply listen. This training was the catalyst for igniting her path in psychotherapy and her journey towards embodied transformational healing and well-BEING.
Her encounter with unnerving incidents of male gaze and incidence of feeling what it was like to be objectified, sexualized, and harassed simply because of her gender was also a crucial factor. Ann recalls a turning point in her life when she was sexually harassed by a man whom she admired, who was in a position of authority and who also happened to be her friend’s father. She recollects how difficult, confusing and emotionally isolating this experience was and how she had very few words to describe what was happening to her. At the time, there was a lack of information, support, and resources to turn to. Thus, she turned inward towards her own resiliency—and in talking about her experience openly and speaking with her friends and family, she realized that her experience was shared amongst many.
“I was not alone. Others had similar and/or worse experiences of being harassed, abused, and or harmed in some way. It was this deep knowing that encouraged me to want to bring the issue of gender-based violence out of the shadows and into the light of our consciousness. It has been my experience that when we come in touch with our own vulnerability and suffering, and see the interconnections between us we can relate and compassionately act to prevent the suffering of others,” she says.
This knowledge compelled Ann Bayly-Bruneel to formalize her learning and pursue education in women’s studies, psychology, and sociology—thus opening her eyes and ears to deeply understand the intersections of trauma, mental health, poverty, racism, oppression, and violence. Inevitably she was moved in the direction of wanting to be a part of the solution to eradicate social injustices for ALL. She began working in a youth residential setting where she learned about the impacts of early child abuse and neglect. Then worked at Women’s College Hospital within the Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Care Centre. This amplified her awareness of gender-based violence and how prevalent it is—and how social attitudes, gender ‘norms’, and patriarchy were at the root of the problem.
A Compassionate Practitioner
As a multi-dimensional BEING, Ann has co-designed her life in alignment with her soul, authentic purpose, values, and essence. She has a private practice called Heart-Sight Psychotherapy and works alongside others and within a Trauma Healing Centre to deepen community care and co-create a vibrant healing matrix. She uses her art and writing to amplify social and liberatory consciousness. As well, she volunteers and co-assists various Somatic Experiencing training to strengthen embodied conscious communities that center healing engagement and embolden collective care and revolutionary inner-standing.
As a heart-centered human who is passionate about collective healing and community care, Ann considers her own trauma healing and transformation as an embodied pathway to ignite, inspire, and awaken us to the potential and possibility that exists outside our conditioned minds and conventional systems. Doing this requires her to shed layers of intergenerational, intersectional, and ancestral trauma and oppression. She has trained in and explored various relationally and integrative approaches to psychotherapy such as; Somatic Experiencing, NARM, IFS, Reiki, Art Therapy, Mindful Self-Compassion, and EMDR…as a means to enhance her personal and professional capacity as well as support others in their own unfolding authentic journey.
Ann Bayly-Bruneel working style is collaborative, radically compassionate, and inclusive of all expressions of diversity and multi-dimensionality. She practices within a framework that embodies anti-oppressive and decolonized values. She honors the shared humanity and the processes that invite people to lean in, soften, and continuously co-evolve.
“I am a co-explorer who notices nuance and complexity in myself and others. I have learned through my own process of cultivated wisdom and honed intuition to pay attention to how words, language, binaries, and paradigms result in more polarization, disconnection, oppression, and harm. Thus, I am ever-curious to reclaim and ignite that which transcends words, and tap into a fluid and responsive creative wisdom which is deep and innately somatic,” says Ann Bayly-Bruneel.
Art as Therapy
Art has helped Ann to not only deal with challenges, but to transform and find creative solutions to them. She has used art to work through communication struggles in her relationships, to understand the impacts of trauma and oppression in her own life and to re-author and re-frame her own story. She used to keep a visual art journal in her adolescence and used it a lot to help process the emotional pains of growing up. When she encounters difficulties at home or at work, she turns to art to help her unearth where she may feel stuck and to bring her unconscious forward.
Clinically, she uses art-making to help deepen her understanding of the individuals that she works with and to notice issues of transference/counter-transference which is the fertile ground of the therapeutic relationship. She also uses art-making for play, relaxation, grounding and mindfulness.
Dealing with Challenges
One of the biggest challenges Ann experienced in her career happened incrementally. She began to feel the impacts of the ‘business model’ in health care. She found her own values and trauma-responsive practice in conflict with the mandate of working within a patriarchal, hierarchical, and oppressive system. She experienced and witnessed moral/soul injury and felt the reverberations of trauma and oppression across people and systems. This shared story of collective grief was further amplified during the pandemic and ignited and grounded her heart-opening practice to amplify embodied compassionate solidarity.
One of the current complexities Ann experiences in the field of psychotherapy is that there is an ever-expanding need to address the vast inequities and intersectional trauma happening on a global scale. There is a lack of resources, support, and inner-standing which leaves many people in cycles of crisis, overwhelm, exhaustion, and collapse. Much of the focus has been on individual mental health and self-care rather than collective and collaborative solutions that center on healing engagement, community care, prevention, and attending to the systemic roots. The silos of patriarchy and colonization result in fractured and traumatized systems that orient from a place of fear, competition, lack, scarcity, and control. These structures aren’t designed to support well-BEING.
Hope with Awareness
Within chaos, there is also an emergent process and Ann has deepened her capacity to listen to this heartbeat too. When we attune to this level, we see that more people are leaning in to engage in their own embodied trauma and nervous system healing. Thus, there is a widening of relational capacity and a growing awareness of our interconnectivity and interdependence.
People are fortifying an embodied approach to well-BEING that uplifts their sovereignty and engaging in creative, radical, and innovative solutions to support individual and collective care simultaneously. Ann is here to support this co-evolution and to work alongside others in support of this transformation and unfolding. Through writing, speaking, and collaborative offerings that come from a place of FLOW and ease, Ann will continue to assist alongside others in igniting and ushering in new ways to radically live and BE. She desires to blaze and co-create radically inclusive pathways that uplift people’s passion, self-agency, and BEING-ness. “Where our work and lives are intentionally interwoven and where our own essence is our currency. This ripple is already here and I co-create as I write and speak,” says Ann.
Words of Experience
Ann Bayly-Bruneel concludes our interaction with the following message for budding entrepreneurs. She says:
“I would like budding entrepreneurs to follow their whole body YES and to recognize that growth requires capacity for grace and grit. It is possible to live a life in accordance and flow within your own value system and to collaborate and dream-awake with others in support of our shared humanity. Together, as more people align to their embodied essence, we can FEEL the possibility and rhythm of co-designing eco-systems that support community wellness, abundance, and liberation and magnify the spirit of love, joy, and play! Infinite possibilities exist every day!”
Quote: “Revolution must include visioning a better future and embodying it now. Our joy, our softness, our love matters! @mamadrogonrising”
Quote: “I believe that every person has the innate ability to live and harness an authentically bold and heart-centred life.”
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