Monique Brideau, Clinical Social Worker

 I am a Registered Clinical Social Worker with 12 years of counselling experience, mainly working with trauma/PTSD, depression and anxiety with a variety of populations via WCB, EAPs, and nonprofit organizations. 

I have worked with nurses, firemedics and corrections officers, including in a critical incident debriefing context. In 2016, I was deployed to several oil and gas camps during the Fort McMurray wildfires to provide crisis debriefing support to firefighters and other evacuees. 

Prior to counselling, I spent a decade working in a variety of crisis counselling and social service roles in the nonprofit sector. 

I hold a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Psychology from Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, NS), a Bachelor of Social Work from Carleton University (Ottawa) and a Masters of Social Work from the University of Calgary.

I am a person-centered therapist and a firm believer in meeting clients where they’re at in a compassionate and nonjudgemental way. 

This means that I work with my clients to identify both their goals for therapy and how they want to achieve them. I also believe in using the mind-body connection to help my clients heal their trauma by identifying and processing their thoughts, emotions and felt sensations.  

I am trained in various clinical treatment modalities, all delivered in accordance with current evidence-based guidelines:

• Eye-Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR)
• Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART)
• Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Brief Solution-Focused Therapy
• Mindfulness-Based Chronic Pain Management (MBCPM)
   

Specialized Support  & Resilience Training:

• Critical-Incident Stress Management (CISM) – peer defusing, Psychological First Aid, and post-incident follow-ups (no mandatory group debriefs)
• Occupational Awareness, Level 1 – First Responder Health
• Compassion-Fatigue & Moral-Distress Education
• Motivational Interviewing (MI)
• Emotion-Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT-C)
• Certified Integrative Body Psychotherapy Practitioner