Listening to and helping people have been my drive for so long that I don’t really know when my clinical vocation has begun. I am the third of four diverse and strongly united siblings who grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in a family full of creative, passionate people, and also affected by some mental health issues. I think that my experience growing up shaped me with a strong sensibility and love for diversity, as also as a strong desire to find effective responses to mental health suffering. If at seven, just after learning to read and write, I told my mom that I was going to be a writer, in the teens I’d say to my friends and family that I wanted to be a Psychologist.
I kept writing while studying to be a researcher and professor in Psychology and Public Health. I graduated and registered as a Psychologist in Brazil in 2007, finished my Master’s in Public Health in 2009, then decided to pursue an international doctorate, in France and Portugal, with funding from the European Commission. I went back to Brazil and worked as a professor and a clinician. When I came to Canada, as a permanent resident, at the beginning of 2020, my experience as an immigrant in Europe had already taught me a great deal of resilience. Here, I worked as a Mental Health Counsellor for the Hamilton Family Health Team and I was able to register as a psychotherapist with CRPO and open my private practice in Burlington.
In total, I have accumulated about fifteen years of professional experience in multiple positions in the area of Mental Health, as a therapist, consultant, researcher, lecturer, and humanitarian worker. Because of my experiences and my writings, I’ve been invited to speak at many events over the past years, including a live debate about Girls’ Rights organized by the UN Brazil in 2014 – which was one of my first and most cherished participation.
As a clinician, I’m trained in DBT – Dialectical Behavior Therapy and I have also studied Feminist Psychology and Existentialist-Phenomenology during my Ph.D. I have always worked through a psychosocial culturally-sensitive approach. and I’ve been training in affirmative care for transgender youth and adults and for indigenous clients in Canada. Besides DBT, I use a Mindfulness-CBT approach, Narrative Approach for Career Counselling, and Ecopsychology, in my sessions.
Check my Services Page for more information.
Carol Pombo 