About Maheen

Maheen Hyder, MSW, RSW is a registered social worker, clinical supervisor and trauma therapist with more than ten years of experience working with adults navigating complex trauma, PTSD, grief, migration, identity, and the emotional afterlife of difficult experiences.

My practice is relational, anti-colonial, queer-affirming, feminist, culturally responsive, and trauma-focused.

I work particularly with racialized, immigrant, refugee, diasporic, and queer clients, and with people who have spent a long time adapting to families, relationships, cultures, or environments that did not always make room for who they were.

What I work with

My areas of focus include:

• Complex trauma and PTSD
• Childhood and relational trauma
• Grief and complicated loss
• Anxiety and depression
• Family conflict and intergenerational patterns
• Migration, displacement, and refugee experiences
• Racial identity, culture, and belonging
• People-pleasing, over-functioning, and difficulty with boundaries
• Emotional overwhelm, shutdown, and difficulty regulating
• Major life transitions
• Questions of faith, sexuality, identity, and home

How I work

Therapy with me is warm, direct, reflective, and collaborative.

My work is informed by emotion-focused therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), psychodynamic, narrative, feminist, and trauma-focused approaches.

I’m interested not only in what you think about an experience, but in what happens emotionally and relationally when you are inside it.

We might pay attention to questions like:

What feeling keeps returning, even when you understand where it comes from?

What happens inside you just before you shut down, become overwhelmed, pull away, or take care of everyone else?

Which parts of you have learned to protect you — through anger, perfectionism, numbness, hyper-independence, people-pleasing, or control?

What are those parts afraid would happen if they stopped working so hard?

Which emotions have been safe for you to express, and which ones have you had to hide, minimize, or turn against yourself?

How do you stay with a difficult feeling without being consumed by it?

What would it mean to set a boundary without abandoning the relationship — or yourself?

I’m interested in the ways our inner lives are shaped by family, culture, history, migration, race, gender, sexuality, class, faith, violence, and belonging. I don’t see these as background details. They are often part of the clinical story.

There is space here for complexity, contradiction, anger, humour, grief, ambivalence, and experiences that do not fit neatly into clinical language.

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I offer virtual individual psychotherapy for adults across Ontario.

If you’re wondering whether we might work well together, you’re welcome to book a free 15-minute consultation. You don’t need to have the right words or know exactly where to begin.

About Maheen Maheen Hyder, MSW, RSW is a registered social worker, clinical supervisor and traum... Read More