Tara Blake
REGISTERED CLINICAL COUNSELLOR | RCC
Your thoughts are not evidence.
They are not who you are.
I am Tara Blake, a Registered Clinical Counsellor at Eterna Counselling and Wellness in Abbotsford, BC. My work sits at a specific intersection: people who are living with OCD and have been misunderstood, or misdiagnosed, or simply never had it named correctly, and women who are navigating the particular kind of unravelling that happens when life asks you to change faster than you have had time to grieve. As a trauma-informed and relational counsellor, I will listen and go at your pace. I lead with the values of acceptance, collaboration, & empowerment so that you feel truly supported and safe. I work with clients on a variety of issues including grief and loss, depression, anxiety, OCD, divorce, aging, and personal development. I have specialized in working with PTSD and complex trauma related to abuse or partner violence.
My Approach?
The work starts with understanding, not fixing.
I begin by exploring what is actually happening—whether that’s the obsessive-compulsive cycle, grief, trauma, or life transitions—before moving toward change. My approach is relational and trauma-informed, meaning I pay attention not just to what you say, but how it shows up in your body and in the room. I work somatically, recognizing that the body holds important information through tension, breath, and fatigue. I move at your pace, without rigid timelines, while still offering enough clinical direction to ensure we are meaningfully progressing—not just circling the same ground.
$150.00
INDIVIDUAL
RCC
# 21943
18+
AGES
Woman's
SPECIALTY
WHO I WORK WITH
Individuals (ages 16 to 55) who have been living with intrusive thoughts, compulsions, or checking behaviours and are ready to finally understand what is actually happening, not just manage the symptoms.
You're between 16 and 55, and the thoughts come without permission. They latch onto the things that matter most — your relationships, your values, your identity — and they won't let go. You've tried arguing with them, distracting yourself, figuring out what they mean. You've built routines and mental habits that bring brief relief, and then the thoughts come back, sometimes louder.
You may not even be sure this is OCD. The content feels too private, too specific, too humiliating to say out loud. What you do know is that a growing portion of your time, energy, and life is being quietly consumed — and that carrying this alone isn't working anymore.
Women ages 35 to 70+ who are navigating the intersection of midlife, hormonal change, shifting identity, and the re-emergence of things they never had adequate support around.
You're somewhere between your late 30s and late 60s. You have been reliable. You've held the emotional weight of your household, your relationships, your career — for so long the weight became invisible. And now something has changed. Maybe it's perimenopause or menopause, and no one told you it could feel like this psychologically.
Maybe your last child has moved out and instead of relief, you feel grief. Maybe a relationship has ended, or become so distant it almost amounts to the same thing. Underneath it all, things you thought you'd dealt with are surfacing — not because you're falling apart, but because your nervous system has been waiting for exactly this much space.
Adults carrying depression, grief, anxiety, relational pain, or a general weight they cannot fully name, who are ready to stop carrying it alone and work with someone who will be honest with them.
You don't need a specific diagnosis or a crisis point to be here. You're an adult carrying something real — a grief that has settled in and won't lift, a depression that's been present long enough you've started to think of it as your personality, an anxiety that isn't dramatic but hums underneath almost everything.
Maybe it's a pattern in relationships you keep repeating and can't quite see from the inside. Maybe it's a disconnection from yourself and your own life that makes rest genuinely difficult and meaning genuinely hard to find. You want to talk to someone who will be honest with you — not just reflect your words back and wait.
WHAT WE'LL WORK ON TOGETHER:
Depression, anxiety, and the weight of daily life
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Understanding what is underneath the depression or anxiety, not just managing the surface
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Addressing the patterns in relationships or thinking that are sustaining the difficulty
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Building a more grounded and less reactive relationship with difficult internal states
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Developing tools that fit your actual life, your actual schedule, your actual capacity, not an idealized version of it
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Moving from a life organized
around managing symptoms toward one that has more room for the things that matter to you
Sitting with grief that does not have a clean shape
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Making space for grief that is layered, delayed, or mixed with feelings that complicate it — ambivalence, relief, guilt, anger
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Working through the grief of divorce or separation, including what it means for your identity and your sense of the future
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Naming losses that don't always get called losses — the role, the relationship you thought you had, the future you imagined
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Attending to grief that was never adequately supported when it happened
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Finding what comes next, not as a resolution to grief, but alongside it
Making sense of OCD, accurately, for the first time
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Naming what's actually happening in perimenopause and menopause — the anxiety, low mood, rage, and grief that rarely get called what they are
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Working through identity shifts when major roles change — empty nest, a changed marriage, a career that no longer fits
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Taking your own experience seriously, not minimizing it
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Attending to old wounds that are surfacing now, and understanding why the timing isn't an accident
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Building a sense of yourself that doesn't depend on who needs you
Processing trauma and what it has left behind
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Working through complex or relational trauma at a pace that your nervous system can actually tolerate, not just intellectually discuss
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Understanding how past experiences are showing up in your present, in your relationships, your physical health, your patterns of thought and behaviour
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Working somatically with what the body has been holding, often for years
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Addressing the specific impacts of partner violence, abuse, or long-term relational harm on your sense of self and your capacity for trust
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Rebuilding the kind of trust in yourself that difficult experiences can quietly erode
Interrupting the OCD cycle & reclaiming your life from it
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Developing practical responses to the cycle that do not feed it, at a pace that is honest about how hard this is
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Working with the anxiety that arises when you do not perform the compulsion, including what that feels like in the body
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Slowly expanding the areas of your life the OCD has contracted, the relationships, the activities, the ordinary moments it has made difficult
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Addressing the ways OCD has affected your sense of self, your relationships, and your ability to be present in your own life
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Building toward a relationship with your own mind that feels liveable
Navigating the psychological weight of midlife & menopause
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Naming what's actually happening in perimenopause and menopause — the anxiety, low mood, rage, and grief that rarely get called what they are
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Working through the identity shifts that come when major roles change — empty nest, a changed marriage, a career that no longer fits
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Taking your own experience seriously, not minimizing it
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Giving real attention to old wounds that are surfacing now, and understanding why the timing isn't an accident
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Building a sense of yourself that doesn't depend entirely on who needs you
I will not rush you. I know that gets said. What I mean is that I do not have a schedule for your progress, and I will not make you feel behind.
I will not treat your OCD as a form of general anxiety and give you tools built for something else. The distinction matters clinically, and you deserve someone who knows the difference.
I will not minimize what you are going through, or imply that you should feel more gratitude, more perspective, or more okayness than you do.
I will not hide behind clinical language to create professional distance. If I think something is important for you to understand about what is happening, I will say it in plain language.
I will not pretend the work is easy, or that there is a clear endpoint where everything will be resolved. I will also not let you sit in it alone.
My Approach?
Trauma-Informed. Relational. Somatic. Genuinely at Your Pace.
Everything I do is trauma-informed, which means your nervous system is always part of what we're working with — not only if you have a trauma history, but because it shapes how safe you feel, how present you can be, and what it actually takes to change a pattern that has been in place for a long time. I work within those realities rather than expecting you to override them.
I also work relationally, which means the relationship between us isn't just a container for the real work — it is part of the real work. The patterns that bring people to therapy, difficulty trusting, difficulty saying the actual thing, dynamics that repeat, show up here too. That's not a problem. It's information, and working with it honestly is some of the most meaningful work we can do.
I pay attention to the body throughout. Not in a way that requires any particular practice or relationship with your body, just a consistent attention to what is happening physically when we are in certain territory, because that is often where the most important information lives.
For OCD specifically, I begin with psycho-education before anything else — not a handout, but a careful explanation of how the obsessive-compulsive cycle works for you, why your current responses are maintaining it, and what responding differently would actually mean. For many people, this produces the first genuine relief they have felt, because for the first time, what is happening makes sense.
And throughout all of it, we go at your pace. Therapy asks you to move toward difficult things. That has to happen within a window of tolerance that is real. I'm paying attention to that edge, and I'm following yours.
Psychoeducation (OCD-specific):
Accurate information about how OCD works is not an optional extra for this population. It is often the first thing that actually helps.
Narrative Therapy
Examining the stories you have come to hold about yourself, your history, and your situation, and creating room to question the ones that are no longer true or were never entirely yours.
Emotion-Focused Therapy
Moving toward the emotions underneath the surface rather than around them, at a pace and in a way that is honest about how difficult that can be.
Somatic Therapy
Attending to what is happening in your body, because the body often carries what words have not yet reached.
Person-Centred Therapy:
The belief that you are the expert on your own experience, and my role is to create the conditions where you can actually access that expertise rather than perform what you think I want to hear.
Trauma-Informed Therapy
The foundation of everything I do. Your history, your nervous system, and the question of what you need to feel safe enough to do this work are always part of the room.
Mindfulness-Based Practice:
Not as a performance of calm, but as a genuine practice of being present with what is happening inside you, including the difficult parts, without being entirely controlled by them.
EDUCATION & TRAININGS
DEGREES & EDUCATION
Master of Counselling Psychology
City University
Bachelor of Arts in Psychology
University of the Fraser Valley
SPECIALIZED TRAININGS
Narrative Therapy - 1 & 2 Foundations
Trauma Sensitive Yoga Training
First Responders Health Certification
PROFFESIONAL REGISTRATIONS
Registered Clinical Counsellor
#21943
Crime Victim Assistance Program
First Nation Health Authority
Emotion Focused Therapy
HOW I GOT HERE:
OUTSIDE THE OFFICE
I came to this work through a combination of clinical interest and genuine frustration — watching people arrive having been misunderstood for years, sometimes by well-meaning clinicians who simply did not have accurate information about what they were treating. The person with OCD who had been through years of therapy that helped their general anxiety and left the OCD completely intact. The woman in her 50s who had spent decades holding a household together, who arrived at what should have been more space in her life and instead found grief and confusion and physical symptoms she could not name, and was told by everyone around her to look on the bright side.
That frustration became an interest in accuracy. In the idea that genuine help requires genuine understanding of what is actually happening, not a well-intentioned approximation of it. I continue to learn about OCD in a way that goes beyond the clinical basics. I understand menopause not just as a physiological event but as a psychological, relational, and identity event.
I am genuinely interested in the neuroscience of how the mind works — not in a way that leads me to lecture clients about their amygdala, but in a way that informs everything I bring into the room and helps me find language for things people have often not been able to name themselves.
I bring my own life experience into this work, not as the subject of sessions but as a source of genuine understanding. I know what it is to navigate significant transitions. I know what grief looks like when it is not clean. I know the particular experience of being a woman moving through the stages of life and realizing that no one adequately prepared you for what some of them would feel like from the inside. That lived understanding is not the same as clinical training, and I carry both.
I have worked with enough people over enough years to recognize the patterns particular to the people I serve — the specific texture of the shame that maintains OCD, the way women in midlife have learned to make themselves smaller, and the complicated feelings that arise when they start to stop doing that. I take the work seriously, and I take the responsibility seriously. And I believe, without qualification, that genuine change is possible. Not quick, not painless, but real.
Outside the Office
Outside of work I am drawn to things that require genuine attention — reading that takes me somewhere I could not have predicted, time in nature that is slow enough to actually register, conversations that go somewhere honest. I am genuinely curious about how things work, whether that is the science of memory or the way a particular relationship dynamic develops over years. That curiosity is not separate from the clinical work. It is what makes me want to keep doing it.