For some of the clients I work with, the first time they recall feeling profound connection wasn’t through their parents, siblings, or friends, but through their pets at home. They describe them as their emotional anchors: meeting them where they are, without expectation, just love. This connection is where they experienced emotional attunement, co-regulation, and unconditional love and acceptance. 

Since creating RWBY Psychotherapy, I questioned whether I should re-brand, wondering who could relate to these four seemingly random letters. I realized the real issue was that I had never shared the story.

Growing up, I was a shy, socially awkward kid who struggled to make friends and often felt disconnected from my parents. I yearned for connection but just didn’t know how to get there. I found myself preferring to hang out with the neighbourhood cat than the kids in our apartment complex. Animals were where I first felt comfort and connection. Ideally, that connection comes through supportive friends, family, and greater community. For those of us who struggle in those relationships, fostering additional connections can also be healing, whether that be through connecting to faith and spirituality, culture, ancestry and traditions, the arts, body and movement, nature or the animals in our lives. 

As a therapist, the core of my work is helping people practice connection: to feel attuned, to co-regulate with someone safe, to experience what it’s like to be met with presence. In many ways, that mirrors what so many of us learned from our pets as children.

There’s still a part of me that wonders if naming my practice after my furry family members is childlike, but there’s another part, the younger version of me, who would be so proud. Proud that I kept that connection alive. Proud that I built a life and career centred on helping people heal through connection.