Sharmeen Rasheed

For a lot of the people I work with, reaching out for therapy wasn’t something that felt available growing up. Mental health was either off the table or spoken about carefully, but never straight on. For others, what brings them here is clearer: a grief that has taken up too much room, an anxiety that has stopped feeling manageable, or a child who is struggling in ways they don’t know how to help with. Whatever shape your story takes, you don’t have to arrive with it figured out.

I work with children, teens, and adults, and I offer therapy in English, Urdu, and Hindi. For a lot of the families I see, language matters in a way that’s hard to overstate. Sometimes the right words for what you’re feeling only arrive in a language you haven’t had to use in a clinical setting before, and being able to move between languages without having to translate yourself, or your grief, or your grandmother’s story, changes what therapy can do.

My work focuses on grief and loss, trauma, anxiety, depression, and family stress, including the specific weight of cultural identity, migration, and family expectation that many of my clients are carrying. With younger clients, I use directive play therapy, including tools that help children safely name and work through big feelings. One of our favourites is a game we call the anger diffuser, which kids tend to get genuinely attached to. With teens and adults, our work might draw from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), narrative therapy, or solution-focused approaches, depending on what you need. My practice is attachment-based, trauma-informed, and culturally safe, which means I pay close attention to the systems, histories, and relationships that shape how we experience pain.

My career before this practice shaped the way I do therapy now in ways I don’t always say out loud in session, but that matter. I spent years in child protection and Indigenous child welfare, and later in research and policy work focused on the systems that surround and sometimes fail the people they’re meant to serve. I also worked with the Office of the Chief Coroner, which deepened my understanding of grief, sudden loss, and the specific weight that families carry when something catastrophic reshapes their lives. All of it taught me that you can’t separate people from the systems they live inside. When someone is struggling, it’s almost never only about them.

I care a lot about therapy not feeling clinical. Too many of the people I work with have been told their pain fits a category, or that they should have processed it by now, or that what they needed most was to keep it together. Our sessions are not that. You don’t have to perform being okay, and you don’t have to perform being not-okay either. I meet you where you are, in whatever language makes sense for the moment, and we go from there.

If any of this sounds like the kind of space you’ve been looking for, I’d love to meet you. I offer a free 20-minute consultation, available in person in Pickering or virtually anywhere in Ontario, in English, Urdu, or Hindi. It’s a low-pressure way to ask questions, see how I work, and get a feel for whether we might be a good fit.