Adult Counselling
On Pender Island, British Columbia

For grief, loss, trauma, major life transitions, and the complicated experience of understanding yourself differently.

DYLAN SPRADLIN, MA, MSW, RCC (they/them)

IN-PERSON COUNSELLING ON PENDER ISLAND • ONLINE COUNSELLING THROUGHOUT BRITISH COLUMBIA

Reach Out for a Consult

Sometimes life changes the story.

Someone dies.

A relationship ends.

Your family changes.

Something frightening happens.

The future you thought you were moving toward is suddenly no longer available to you.

Sometimes there is a clear before and after.

And sometimes there isn’t.

Maybe you’ve been functioning for a long time — working, caring for people, managing what needs to be managed — while quietly becoming more exhausted, disconnected, overwhelmed, or unsure of yourself.

Maybe you’ve recently realized you’re autistic, ADHD, or both, and suddenly parts of your history make sense in an entirely different way.

Or maybe you simply know that the way you’ve been getting through things isn’t working anymore.

You don’t have to arrive with a diagnosis, a perfectly articulated goal, or a clear explanation for why you’re struggling.

We can start with what is happening now.

Living somewhere beautiful doesn’t make you immune to being human.

Island life can offer quiet, nature, community, and a little more room to breathe.

It can also be isolating sometimes.

The social world is smaller. Privacy looks different. Getting off-island takes planning. The people around you may know one another — or know you — in ways they simply wouldn’t in a larger place.

And sometimes you can deeply love the life you have built while still being lonely, grieving, overwhelmed, uncertain, or needing something that belongs only to you.

Therapy can be one of those places.

You don’t need to explain island life to me.

It’s simply part of the context we’re working within.

Not everything that hurts looks dramatic from the outside.

Sometimes distress looks like:

Anxiety or a nervous system that rarely seems to settle
Irritability or feeling perpetually one small inconvenience away from losing it
Burnout and exhaustion
Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
Feeling numb, disconnected, or emotionally flat
Trouble sleeping or actually resting
Overthinking everything
Perfectionism
People-pleasing or difficulty knowing what you actually want
Feeling responsible for everyone around you
Pulling away from people you care about
Feeling like ordinary life requires an unreasonable amount of effort
Knowing you are functioning but not really feeling like you are living

Sometimes you’ve become so good at coping that nobody else realizes how hard you’re working to hold everything together.

Sometimes you barely realize it yourself.

Grief is bigger than bereavement.

Death is one of losses we grieve.

It isn’t the only one.

We grieve relationships.

Health.

Homes.

Friendships.

Communities.

Family relationships we needed but never really had.

A career or identity that no longer fits.

The future we thought was going to happen.

The version of ourselves we had to become in order to survive.

Sometimes there is no ritual, casserole, sympathy card, or culturally recognized space for those losses.

But the nervous system knows something changed.

Grief does not need to be fixed, rushed, reframed into gratitude, or turned into a lesson.

Sometimes it needs company.

Sometimes it needs language.

Sometimes it needs room to be exactly as contradictory as it is — love and anger, relief and devastation, tenderness and resentment, laughter in the middle of something impossibly sad.

I make room for all of that.

What therapy can actually look like

We may sit together in my cozy therapy space, light a candle, and talk, if that’s what suits you.

Or we may take a walk along Pender’s winding roads, depending on the weather — and your fortitude. There is science behind bilateral movement supporting regulation and nervous-system integration, if you’re into that science. And for some people, side-by-side conversation simply comes more easily and creates a little more room around difficult things.

As you share, I may notice your movement, how you hold your body, or where you hold your breath. I may bring in movement, imagery, or metaphor if that works for you.

There are many ways to develop greater awareness of, and connection to, yourself and your nervous system.

Sometimes I may offer drawing, journalling, mindfulness, meditation — even oracle cards — whatever gives us another way into something words alone haven’t reached.

And you may bring something into the work, too.

We may laugh.

We may swear.

You may realize halfway through a sentence that the thing you thought you came in to discuss is not actually the thing at all.

I work in a depth-oriented, relational way. My approach is informed by NARM, relational neuroscience, attachment, trauma work, grief counselling, mindfulness, neurodivergence, and decades of curiosity about why human beings do what we do.

There is structure when structure is useful.

There is also room for mystery, contradiction, creativity, and the parts of human experience that cannot be neatly reduced to a worksheet.

Later-realized neurodivergence can rearrange your whole history.

Realizing you are ADHD, autistic, or AuDHD later in life can bring enormous relief.

Oh. That explains so much.

And then sometimes comes the tangle of feelings.

What if I had known earlier?

Why was everything so hard?

How much energy have I spent trying to be someone I wasn’t?

Which parts of me are actually me, and which parts were built around surviving expectations I could never quite meet?

You may begin revisiting school, relationships, work, parenting, (your own parents!) friendships, sensory experiences, burnout, and decades of stories about being too much, too sensitive, too scattered, too intense, too lazy, too rigid, too emotional, or somehow perpetually doing life incorrectly.

Therapy isn’t about replacing those judgments with a shinier set of rules about how a neurodivergent person is supposed to be.

It can be a place to become curious about yourself again.

To notice what actually supports you.

To recognize masking and old adaptations.

To grieve what needs grieving.

And to begin building a life that fits the nervous system you actually have.

You do not need to become easier to manage.

A lot of people arrive in therapy believing they need to become better at coping with circumstances that have been hurting them for years.

Sometimes coping skills are genuinely useful.

But I’m not particularly interested in helping you tolerate the intolerable more efficiently.

We can also ask:

What keeps happening here?

What does your nervous system expect?

What did you learn you had to do to stay connected, safe, useful, loved, or accepted?

What happens when you stop overriding yourself?

What actually feels like yours?

What might change if the goal were not to become a better-performing version of yourself, but a more deeply connected one?

That is often where our work begins.

You don’t have to choose between science and the sacred here.

I value evidence, neuroscience, clinical training, and understanding how our brains, bodies, relationships, and nervous systems work.

I also make room for what is meaningful to you.

Spirituality. Ritual. Intuition. Nature. Ancestry. Astrology. Energy work. Symbolism. The sacred. Crystal magic.

Or absolutely none of those things.

You don’t have to believe in any of them for me to work with you. If you’re a science nerd, you’re very welcome here.

I’m comfortable holding apparently contradictory ways of understanding an experience without needing one of them to cancel the other out.

I tend to make my home where science and spirituality meet. I believe they intersect in interesting ways — and I’m comfortable leaving room for what we understand, what we’re still learning, and what may remain mysterious.

You don’t have to edit any part of yourself to make it sound sufficiently clinical in the therapy room.

Learn more

Online counselling can work beautifully for adults.

Online therapy is available throughout British Columbia.

For some people, being at home makes it easier to settle into the work. There is no ferry, commute, waiting room, or transition back into the world immediately afterward.

You can have your dog beside you.

Your tea.

Your blanket.

Your own chair.

And when something tender comes up, you get to remain in your own space afterward rather than immediately climbing into a car.

For others, leaving home and entering a separate physical therapy space is important.

Neither is inherently better.

We can use what works for you.

Sometimes 50-minutes isn’t enough

There are times when weekly therapy works beautifully.

There are also times when the hour ends just as you finally reach the thing you came to talk about.

Or you know there is something you want to move toward and would rather have several uninterrupted hours than approach it fifteen minutes at a time over the next six months.

That is why I also offer Personal Therapy Retreats.

These are longer sessions for adults who want time to slow down, go deeper, follow what emerges, take breaks when needed, and work without constantly keeping one eye on the clock.

They may be particularly helpful around grief and loss, major transitions, trauma, identity, later-realized neurodivergence, or a place in your life where you simply feel stuck.

Personal Therapy Retreats are available in person on Pender Island and, when appropriate, online throughout British Columbia.

Learn about personal retreats here