Simone Moniz, Edmonton, AB (2026)

12/30/2025

Thinking of many people who are navigating grief and loss during the holiday season. New Years can be bittersweet for many grievers because it’s a day that symbolizes a new chapter that they solidifies their loss and leaving behind a familiar chapter. If you are noticing resistance in moving to the next year, this is grief and loss. Sending comfort if you are

✨Grieving the end of a relationship
✨Grieving a loved one who died
✨Grieving your health and a new diagnosis
✨Grieving traditions of the holiday season of years past that couldn’t happen this year.
✨Grieving the many other losses that life sends us.

It is okay if you aren’t able to be joyous for NYE and the beginnings of 2026. You aren’t alone.

12/21/2025

Today is our Winter Solstice, meaning we are halfway done our winter! In the northern hemisphere, today is our shortest day of sunlight, meaning our days will be getting longer with increasing daylight!

While this can give many a hopeful surge of energy, I wanted to reflect on Mother Nature and how she has set up this season to be. During the deep part of our winter, Mother Nature has wisely integrated slowness, rest and going inwards into nature, including many of her hibernating animals. While the other seasons can be full of energy and productivity, she puts into the calendar year peace and rest as a valuable energy reset.

So with the upcoming the busyness of holidays and the pressure of New Years Resolutions, wintering reminders may be necessary. Wintering is metaphorically for humans to describe a necessary, restful, and reflective period of retreat.

Swipe to learn more ideas on wintering. But if this season feels to lonely or overwhelming to attain parts of wintering, please know you aren’t alone. It’s okay to ask for help.

12/04/2025

Since I was young, I’ve been told I was so good with children, that the ultimate conclusion & message was I was going to be such a good mom when I grow up.

And that was the message reinforced by many people, sources of influence (ie patriarchal media) and society. And I remember receiving only that message over decades of my life.

It wasn’t until I met while holding her baby that I was told I would be a great psychologist with those caregiving skills. Those caregiving skills were my passion around infant mental health and attachment.

That simple message opened up possibilities to reflect on whether I WANTED to be a mom, while grieving the missed opportunities of messaging I could have received about my caregiving skills. Subsequently, I was able to reflect on my limits, while being curious around what are the alternatives of loving children without reproducing my own? Well… there are plenty and when I settled on that openness, a relief entered my body and I was at peace with not rushing my life and enjoying the moments in front of me.

Ultimately, having children is such a deeply personal choice and never should be something to assume one should do. No matter what. I share this self-disclosure through this trend to humanize the multilayered value of children, as I am honoured to navigate these deeply personal choices with individuals in their own perinatal journey.

10/07/2025

Self disclosure time! Putting this here as a nugget of wisdom MY THERAPIST passed onto me.

Early in building a therapeutic relationship with my clients, I highlight to my clients I’m a human before I’m a psychologist. Radical acceptance is something I model & co-regulate with my clients but I need to go to my therapist to ask for similar support.

I struggle with expectations, control and having acceptance for many things and some people in my life. Especially during difficult times or huge moments of change!! Sometimes I struggle to accept reality (data that has been offered to me over, over and over again) and what I hope things to be (here enters grief and loss, disappointment, resentment, frustration etc!)

So putting this here as a helpful reminder to me and to others. You aren’t alone with this type of suffering. Working with mindful acceptance and self-compassion are components that take us to transformative acceptance, and its journey!

🫶🏾

09/29/2025

Someone recently asked me what population I loved to work with…I said enthusiastically “Resentful _____” (I did say women, but I love working with parents, caregivers, teachers…generally anyone who is undervalued, overstretched and never encouraged to set boundaries, put themselves first, invest in themselves.)

Many of these people come to me and share their feelings around resentment and they seem sheepish or upset that this emotion is in their life.

But me? I simply get revved up and excited. Why? Resentment is such a fierce BFF warrior emotion; while other emotions are still your ride-and-die friends, but most of them show up softly. Resentment is that BFF that will show up for you and try to defend you, no matter what.

But we were never taught to listen and learn from resentment. We were taught to ignore it because if we feel it, only bad things will happen or it speaks negatively about me. Essentially, we are taught resentment, like all “negative” emotions, is noise we tune out.

In Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown explains that resentment falls more towards envy than anger. It comes from the inability to ask for what you need and acknowledge your own limits. It comes from lack of doing something that will get you want you want/need in life. It comes from a lack of boundaries of seeing someone doing something for themselves but that you aren’t willing to do/fight for yourself.

Essentially, resentment is sending signals of important data: where am I self-abandoning and what is one small thing that I can do for myself?

09/04/2025

Two things can be true.

An emotion that feels big is still valid AND a limit that needs to be followed.

When talking about emotion coaching & co-regulation, a huge part of that role is empathy and allowing them to “tell me more”. But when we empathize with people without setting a boundary/limit/expectation, we may set up a dynamic of enabling them away from their truest skilled capacity. We then may shift to an over/under-functioning dynamic.

When we do both empathy & boundary, our little (and big) people learn to feel safe in these heavier (and at times not societally accepted) emotions. When they feel safe with them due to feeling seen and not alone, they will be more likely to learn to self-regulate them (over lots of co-regulation practice!) versus avoid them or the situations that trigger them.

And little people are inherent problem solvers and sometimes want to push limits, especially with the presence of dysregulated emotions. So when these feelings shows up, it’s okay to say I see your feelings that are guiding the choice/behaviour, but this is the expectation/limit.

It’s a certainly a balanced dance of empathy and boundaries. Sometimes we may spend more time on the empathy side of things, than on the boundary side of things. There is no perfect formula.

08/26/2025

NO!!! You don’t need to share details about the trauma or your past. Trust that your therapist knows how to guide a trauma-sensitive approach to your therapeutic experience.

But also clients feel alone in their story AND feel the need to share to feel less overwhelmed. Therefore, it may be healing to share your story:

💚 If it is done willingly, not out of cohersion (“I should tell my therapist everything!”) or its not done from a people-pleasing perspective (“My therapist must know all the details of my trauma…even if I dysregulate!”)

💚If Safety is established within the therapeutic relationship. Meeting a helper doesn’t mean they need to get your most vulnerable side of your suffering. Also important for the client to truly understand the POWER of consent and FREEDOM to say “I need to stop sharing now..”. Clients may feel the history taking is incomplete, but when a client feels empowered to stop, that is the value of therapy!!!

💚If there is skill development, whether that looks like clients are aware of emotions, sensations in their body and are naming it “I’m noticing [sensation, belief etc]; “Here are my tears and sadness, which show up when thinking about this” or using other grounding resources.

It is that last piece of skill development, clients will grow with a trauma-informed therapist. With tskills within a safe therapeutic relationship, a client can slowly titrate their story to help heal, to find peace and ground in acceptance.

07/11/2025

It was such a privilege to attend trauma-informed ACT from in Vancouver, and a bonus to do it with my colleague .in.yeg

Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) is one of my favourite therapeutic frameworks. It models a flexible & client-centred approach, allowing the clinician to meet client with their most pressing symptoms.

With ACT, the trauma-sensitive approach is helping clients learn to:
🌟Be present, living in the here and now
🌟Open up and heal from the past
🌟Building the future and doing what matters for the life you want to lead

From an ACT perspective, suffering is due to inflexibility and avoidance. Your suffering may have you stuck, but certainly far from broken. You may need a different perspective to move towards your resilience and flourish in the life in the moment.

Side note: I show many of Dr. Harris’ Happiness Trap videos in session with my clients, so the last two days definitely felt like hanging out with a celebrity, lol!!!

07/07/2025

While Amazon Prime Days are nearing, I wanted to offer an anti-capitalistic reminder that your whole body deserves patience and reasonable expectations. There is no overnight delivery promise with the complexity of healing.

Changing habits and growing new ones takes time. You are ✨too magical and unique✨ to compare yourself to an automatic computer service. Or get swayed by a product’s quick fix guarantee. Have patience with yourself.

🤍🤍

07/04/2025

With the first summer long weekend in our rearview, it really feels like summer! June was such a busy month for many, from everything with school year ends to (out-of-town) sport tournaments, people were yearning for slowing down. What many people were reporting was a regret of overscheduling and overcommitting, consequently experiencing symptoms of burnout.

So now that we are in July, it’s time to TRY to choose differently. So maybe take this a reminder reset about slowing down. For the busy bees out there, taking a slow moment may feel like a waste of time…but maybe it’s okay (or even crucial) to waste some time.

Happy July and let’s slow down!!

06/27/2025

I work with so many skilled and wise clients, and after they share a bit of their update and process what was happening within a problem/conflict they were having with a loved one (partner, child, friend etc), they universally state to me they know what they needed to do but couldn’t. They share that in their jobs they are able to do these things with their colleagues, students etc. but why can’t they do it with it the person they love?

I respond back, “Well that’s love! Love makes things more personal, because you care, want better and fear things for the future with this person. Love does that. Love triggers that bias and then we can lose all common sense. You fight because of love.”

I even share that as a psychologist, the College of Alberta Psychologists (and many other healthcare licensing organization worldwide) strongly suggest not working with our loved ones. It is because we won’t be able to be neutral, unbiased and it creates a conflict of interest. I can’t treat my loved ones because I may unknowingly (or even knowingly, lol) impart my own interest into the treatment. That’s not okay in my role. I deeply care for my clients, but don’t love them. That is the difference.

But clients can learn to do things differently. It takes awareness of the hat of love you wear when being with your loved one AND the practice of communication skills, self-regulation, boundaries (and other stuff too) with someone neutral (like a therapist) to make a stronger connection to your innate wisdom and skills.

06/19/2025

Do you ever catch your multitasking? In the kitchen, cooking a meal, then emptying the dishwasher, rushing to switch the laundry, remembering to send a text, add to the grocery list, grab something from a different room, prompting a loved one to do something…then realized what you were cooking is now burning?!?

According to a popular stereotype, women are better at multitasking than men, but empirical evidence for gender differences in multitasking performance is mixed. Some research explored medium-to-large gender differences, their findings strongly suggest that there are no substantial gender differences in multitasking performance across different types of tasks. But because of this stereotype, many women claim that they are better at multitasking than the opposite s*x and therefore fall into this conditioning of needing to do more, fix more, keep busy, be responsible for more. Thus, in my example, burning something or even worse, burning out.

Understanding the hidden costs of multitasking may help people to choose strategies that boost their efficiency - above all, by avoiding multitasking, especially with complex tasks. Things like:
🙃Simple tasks, like talking on the phone while switching over the laundry, is probably accessible.
🙃Doing a couple of mid-simple things, but taking a mindful second and breath with the task switch.
🙃Breaking down the complex task into smaller tasks, focusing on more task at a time for an allotted period. Then switch to another complex task if need be.

Multitasking while completing a complex task, a pile of simple tasks or a couple of high risk tasks, like texting while driving, can have varied yet devastating consequences.

Who else habitually multitasks?🫣🙋🏽‍♀️

Simone Moniz

12/30/2025

12/21/2025

12/04/2025

10/07/2025

09/29/2025

09/04/2025

08/26/2025

07/11/2025

07/07/2025

07/04/2025

06/27/2025

06/19/2025

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