You have spent a long time making yourself easier to love: smaller, quieter, less complicated.
In relationships, you recognize the pattern even as you're living inside it. Someone meets you fully - present, curious, alive to you. And then, gradually, they recede. And as they do, something ancient begins: you silence the need rising in your throat. You make yourself smaller. You tell yourself you're asking for too much.
You are so afraid that if you ask, they will leave. And they do, one way or another....
It didn't begin with the last person who pulled away. It began much earlier - in a house where you learned that your needs were too much, your feelings had nowhere to go, and the safest thing you could do was disappear a little.
You were moulded to fit others' needs before you were old enough to know your own shape. You are still contorting.
You were a child who learned to be invisible because visibility felt dangerous. Who learned that needing things from people made you a burden. Who learned, in ways no child ever should, that the easiest way to keep love close was to make yourself smaller.
Your nervous system is still living in that house.
The patterns that exhaust you now did not appear by accident. They were shaped in a world where visibility carried a cost. They helped you survive what you could not yet leave, and kept you loved, in the only way love was available to you then. That matters. It deserves to be named.
But you don't want to live in survival anymore. You are pressing against the edges, searching for the cracks.
The connection you're longing for has always required the one thing you learned wasn't safe: being seen.
That's what we work on.
IS THIS THE RIGHT FIT?
THIS WORK MAY BE RIGHT FOR YOU IF
You're a high-achieving woman who appears to have your life together and feels existentially alone inside it. You've tried to think your way out of a relational pattern that shows up identically in your romantic relationships, your friendships, your family, your work. You're ready to go deeper than insight alone.
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT
Depth-oriented, relational therapy grounded in attachment, polyvagal theory, and family systems. Emotion-focused, somatic, and experiential - we work with the body, not just the mind. You are the expert on your own experience. I follow your lead.
AFFIRMING FOR
All people on the gender spectrum, including trans women, non-binary, and gender fluid. Queer, polyamorous, monogamous, and non-monogamous relationships. All relational structures welcome. This practice is grounded in anti-oppressive, critical feminist, and anti-colonial frameworks - your inner world cannot be separated from the world you inherited.
FORMAT
Individual therapy for adult women. In-person in Victoria, BC - sessions held in a quiet, private office downtown. Secure virtual sessions available across Canada. Sessions are $120 (60 minutes). Free 20-minute consultation to begin - no charge, no commitment.
CREDENTIALS & ACCOUNTABILITY
Lucy Morris, MPCC-P — Master Practitioner in Clinical Counselling - Provisional, registered with the Canadian Professional Counsellors Association. The provisional designation means I am in a structured period of supervised practice - a requirement of my registering body that ensures new clinicians have additional support as they build their practice. In plain terms: the work we do together is held by more than one clinician. That oversight exists specifically to protect you.
ABOUT
I came to this work from the fashion industry, including ten years as a freelance makeup artist. What I enjoyed the most wasn't the creativity, it was connection. The conversation that started as small talk and became something else entirely. The moment someone let their guard down and said something true. I was drawn to those moments before I had any language for why.
I know what it is to feel like you're on the outside of something everyone else seems to understand. To move through the world
doing everything right and still feel like something essential is missing - not in your life, but in you. I know what it costs to carry that quietly, alone, for a very long time.
I am a white, cisgender, settler woman with two invisible disabilities. I move through the world holding privileges I did not earn alongside experiences of invisibility I did not choose. I know something about the gap between how we appear and the truth of our reality. These are not abstract commitments: they shape how I sit with you in this room.
What drew me to this work, and what keeps me here, is something called moral beauty - the felt sense of witnessing another person act with courage and integrity in the moments when it costs them something. I see it in my clients every single day: the courage it takes to finally say the thing you've never said. To stay in the room when every instinct is telling you to disappear. To keep reaching for connection after it has failed you, again and again. I am genuinely moved by this. Every time.
I know that real change is possible - not because I was taught to believe it, but because I have seen it. In the room, between two people, when something finally loosens that has been held for a very long time.
I'm glad you found this page.
Lucy Morris, MPCC-P · Victoria, BC
© relational alchemy counselling · Lucy Morris, MPCC-P · Victoria, BC
relational alchemy counselling is located in Victoria, BC, on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples - the Songhees and Xʷsepsəm (Esquimalt) Nations - and the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. I offer virtual counselling across the Canadian portion of Turtle Island, on the traditional territories of many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples. I am grateful to live and work on this land, and I hold this gratitude as an ongoing commitment, not a formality. I am committed to the ongoing work of examining my own settler positionality, confronting what I have inherited, and deepening my capacity to offer care that is genuinely accountable to the communities I serve.