Seek help if:
- Symptoms last more than two weeks
- Daily life feels unmanageable
- You have thoughts of harming yourself or your baby
- You feel anxious, panicked, or scared most of the day
- Immediate help: Call 911 if you feel you or someone else is in danger.
Other ways to cope:
- Talk to your doctor or OB-GYN—they can screen for postpartum depression and anxiety.
- Connect with a psychotherapist for guidance and coping strategies.
- Share your feelings with trusted family or friends.
- Practice self-care: rest, eat well, and accept help.
- Join support groups for new parents.
Therapy for Women in Newmarket & York Region, For the Woman Who Has Been Everyone Else's Person
You are good at taking care of things. You show up. You manage. You hold it together for everyone around you. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you have lost track of yourself, your own needs, your own feelings, your own sense of who you are outside of what you do for others.
This is one of the most common things I hear from women who reach out for therapy. Not that they are falling apart, but that they are quietly disappearing into their own life.
As a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) in Newmarket, I offer therapy specifically for women virtually across Ontario. I work with anxiety, depression, burnout, self-esteem, people-pleasing, the Good Girl Syndrome, postpartum mental health, trauma, relationship difficulties, life transitions, and women in midlife. No waitlist. Sessions available day and evening.
No Waitlist
Start this week.
Free 15-min call
No commitment
Day & Evening
Flexible hours
Virtual
All of Ontario
What Brings Women to Therapy
Women often arrive at therapy later than they should have. Not because they did not recognise something was wrong, but because they kept putting themselves last. Because asking for help felt selfish. Because they thought they should be able to handle it.
If any of that sounds familiar, you’re in the right place.
“I take care of everyone else but I do not know how to take care of myself.”
“I say yes to everything and then resent it.”
“I have achieved everything I was supposed to and I still feel empty.”
“I do not know who I am outside of being a mother, a partner, a daughter, an employee.”
“I am exhausted in a way that sleep does not fix.”
“I feel guilty for wanting more.”
These are not small complaints. They are the signs of a person who has been running on empty for a long time, who has built a life around being needed and has lost touch with being known.
Therapy is a space where you do not have to manage anyone else’s feelings. Where you are not responsible for how the session goes. Where what you feel matters, full stop.
What I Work With in Therapy for Women
The Good Girl Syndrome
This is one of the areas I am most passionate about and most experienced in. The Good Girl Syndrome describes a pattern that many women recognise immediately, the deeply internalised belief that being good means being agreeable, accommodating, self-sacrificing, and emotionally available to everyone at all times. It is the inability to say no without guilt, the compulsive apologising, the constant monitoring of how others are feeling, the terror of being seen as difficult, demanding, or too much.
The Good Girl Syndrome is not a character trait. It is a learned pattern, usually formed early in life, that made sense in the environment where it developed. In adult life, it becomes a source of exhaustion, resentment, identity confusion, and anxiety. Therapy helps women understand where this pattern came from, recognise how it shows up in their daily lives, and build a different relationship with their own needs and limits.
If this resonates, this piece on postpartum anxiety and the Good Girl pattern explores how it shows up specifically in the postpartum period and may give you a clearer picture of whether this is what you are navigating.
Anxiety and Stress in Women
Anxiety in women is significantly underdiagnosed and frequently misattributed to personality traits like being a worrier, being sensitive, or being high-strung. The particular anxiety patterns that develop around performance, relationships, appearance, and meeting the needs of others are shaped by specific social and relational pressures that therapy needs to account for. I work with the full spectrum of anxiety presentations in women, from generalised worry to panic to social anxiety to health anxiety. For more detail on how I approach anxiety specifically, anxiety therapy in Newmarket covers that work in full.
Depression in Women
Depression in women frequently presents differently from the clinical stereotype. It often looks like high functioning, relentless busyness, and quiet despair rather than visible collapse. Many women with depression appear completely fine from the outside while privately experiencing profound emptiness, disconnection, and exhaustion. For more on how I approach depression, depression therapy in Newmarket covers that in detail.
Self-Esteem and Identity
Low self-esteem in women is rarely about vanity or superficiality. It is usually about a deep and longstanding disconnection from a sense of inherent worth, from the belief that you are enough without performing, achieving, or pleasing. Therapy works with the core beliefs and relational patterns that underlie low self-esteem, and builds a more grounded, stable sense of self that does not depend on external validation.
People-Pleasing and Boundaries
The inability to set and maintain limits is one of the most common presenting concerns for women in therapy. It shows up in relationships, at work, in families, and with friends. It generates resentment, exhaustion, and a growing sense of being used. Therapy helps women understand what drives people-pleasing at its root, develop the capacity to tolerate the discomfort of saying no, and build relationships that are based on genuine connection rather than management of others’ emotions.
Burnout and Overwhelm
The particular burnout that develops when a woman has been managing a household, a career, relationships, children, and the emotional labour of holding everything together without adequate support or recognition. For more on how I approach burnout specifically, burnout therapy in Newmarket covers that work in detail.
Postpartum and Perinatal Mental Health
The mental health challenges of pregnancy and the postpartum period are some of the most significant and most underserved in women’s health. I bring both clinical training and personal lived experience to this work. For full detail on how I approach postpartum mental health, postpartum therapy in Newmarket covers the full scope of that work.
Relationship Difficulties
Patterns in relationships, the tendency to attract unavailable partners, the difficulty asserting needs, the fear of conflict, the over-functioning that leaves women carrying relationships almost entirely alone, are often connected to early attachment experiences and the Good Girl patterns developed in childhood. Therapy helps women understand their relational patterns and build the capacity for relationships that are genuinely mutual.
Life Transitions
The major transitions of a woman’s life, becoming a mother, leaving a relationship, changing careers, children leaving home, entering midlife, losing a parent, often require a renegotiation of identity that is more complex than it first appears. Therapy provides the space to navigate those transitions with intention rather than simply surviving them.
Trauma and Abuse
Many women carry trauma from childhood abuse, sexual assault, domestic violence, or other experiences of violation and powerlessness that have shaped their relationship with themselves and others in profound ways. Trauma-informed therapy for women is careful, paced, and built around safety and trust. For more detail on how I approach trauma treatment, trauma therapy in Newmarket covers that work in full.
Women in Midlife
Midlife brings its own particular set of challenges for women. Identity shifts as children grow up or careers plateau. The physical changes of perimenopause and menopause. The reckoning with choices made and paths not taken. The grief of certain possibilities closing. Therapy in midlife is often some of the most meaningful and transformative work I do, because women arrive with enough life experience to do it deeply.
How I Work With Women
Attachment-Based Approaches
Most of the patterns that bring women to therapy, the people-pleasing, the difficulty with limits, the anxiety about relationships, the tendency to over-function, have their roots in early attachment experiences. Understanding those roots does not excuse the patterns, but it changes the relationship a woman has with them from shame to curiosity, which is the beginning of genuine change.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT is particularly well suited to the patterns that bring many women to therapy. The Good Girl Syndrome, people-pleasing, and burnout all involve a particular form of psychological rigidity, doing what feels necessary to manage others’ responses rather than what is actually aligned with your own values. ACT builds the psychological flexibility to act from your own values rather than from fear of disapproval.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
CBT helps identify and change the thought patterns that sustain low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and people-pleasing. The self-critical inner voice, the catastrophising about what will happen if you disappoint someone, the belief that your needs are a burden, these are all patterns that CBT directly addresses.
Somatic Awareness and Nervous System Regulation
Many of the patterns I work with in therapy for women are held in the body as much as in the mind. The tension that comes with saying no, the physical anxiety of conflict, the exhaustion that does not improve with rest. Somatic approaches work with these physical patterns directly, helping women develop a more grounded and regulated relationship with their own nervous system.
Psychoeducation
Understanding the social and developmental roots of the patterns that bring women to therapy is often deeply validating and relieving. Many women have spent years blaming themselves for patterns that are entirely understandable responses to the environments and relationships that shaped them. Psychoeducation replaces self-blame with understanding.
Most clients begin to notice a real shift within 8 to 12 sessions. I check in on your progress regularly, and I adjust the approach as your needs change.
Mindfulness-Based Therapy
Mindfulness approaches help women develop the capacity to notice what they are actually feeling, rather than immediately moving into management mode. For women who have spent years attending to everyone else’s emotional states, developing attunement to their own is often genuinely novel and profoundly useful.
Behavioural Activation
For women whose depression or burnout has led to withdrawal from activities that previously provided pleasure, connection, or a sense of self, Behavioural Activation provides a structured approach to gradually reengaging with a life that contains more of what matters.
What to Expect When We Work Together
Your first session is 50 minutes focused on understanding your experience, what brings you to therapy, what you have already tried, and what you most want to change. There is no expectation that you arrive having figured out what is wrong. Many women arrive simply knowing that the way things are is not sustainable. That is enough.
Sessions are collaborative and built around what you need. Some women want practical tools and strategies. Others want space to think and feel without having to manage anyone else’s response to it. Most want both. I follow your lead.
Therapy for Women with Maria | Self-Help Books | General Therapy | |
Specialist focus on women’s patterns | ✓ | Partial | Varies |
Good Girl Syndrome expertise | ✓ | Partial | Rarely |
Postpartum and perinatal experience | ✓ | ✗ | Varies |
Lived experience and clinical training | ✓ | ✗ | Varies |
No waitlist | ✓ | N/A | Often |
Virtual across Ontario | ✓ | N/A | Varies |
Extended benefits coverage | ✓ | ✗ | Varies |
You've been managing this long enough.
Let's actually change it.
No waitlist. Most clients start within the same week as their consultation call.
- Sessions from $120
- Extended benefits accepted
- In-person & virtual
- Day & evening hours
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know before booking your first session.
How much does therapy for women cost in Newmarket?
Sessions are $120 per 50-minute appointment. Many extended health benefit plans in Ontario cover sessions with a Registered Psychotherapist. A receipt is provided after every session for direct submission to your insurer. Check your plan under “Registered Psychotherapist (RP)” or “Psychotherapy.”
Do you only work with women?
No. I offer therapy to adults, teens, and families regardless of gender. The Therapy for Women page reflects a specific area of focus and expertise. If you are not a woman but the themes on this page resonate with your experience, please reach out. These patterns do not belong exclusively to any one gender.
How many sessions will I need?
This depends on what brings you to therapy and how long the patterns have been established. Women working on specific presenting concerns like anxiety or burnout often see meaningful progress within 10 to 16 sessions. Deeper work around identity, attachment patterns, and long-standing relational dynamics typically benefits from longer engagement. I discuss realistic timelines at the assessment stage.
Do you offer virtual therapy in Ontario?
Yes. Virtual sessions are available to women anywhere in Ontario, day or evening. Many women find virtual therapy particularly accessible given the demands on their time.
Is there a waitlist?
No. There is currently no waitlist. You can book a free 15-minute consultation and typically begin your first full session within the same week.
What if I have never been to therapy before?
Then you are in good company. Many of the women I work with come to therapy for the first time after years of managing alone. There is no prior experience required and no expectation that you know how therapy works. The first session is as much about getting to know each other as it is about anything else.