Due to growing responsibilities as a teacher and supervisor, I cannot respond to inquiries about finding a therapist. Please consult my links page for the names of therapists who may be accepting new clients at this time.  

For academic inquiries, I can be reached at  alison.carpenter@mcgill.ca

For clinical supervision, I can be reached at alisoncarpentertherapy@gmail.com

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
Anais Nin

I grew up in Montreal and have spent time living in Toronto, Nova Scotia, Pennsylvania, Stockholm and New York.  On two occasions I have moved back to Montreal from somewhere else.  I love this city and have made my long-term home in the Plateau since 1997.

Very important influences on my road towards being a therapist:

• a mother who believed in the idea of “getting help”
•  a first adult job at the pioneering feminist Bay Centre for Birth Control in Toronto
• a very positive experience with a therapist in early adulthood
• an education focused on the study of oppression, gender and power at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, and,
• a Master’s degree which allowed me to develop my sexuality-oriented therapy work through extensive individual and group counselling experience and a thesis entitled Toward Sexual Empowerment: the development of women’s critical self-consciousness in groupwork.

There are some other practices and influences over the years that enhance my work as a therapist.

• in-depth training towards certification in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT)
• meditation—buddhist/mindfulness, transcendental, yoga and 5Rhythms movement therapy
• regular peer supervision
• being a sessional lecturer for the Couple and Family Therapy Program at the McGill School of Social Work since 2020
• being a clinical supervisor for therapists in private practice and CFT interns
• being a mother of two adults
• benefitting from complementary health care: physio, osteopathy, homeopathy, chiropractic, many kinds of massage, acupuncture and Chinese medicine
• being a part-time musician and performer–violin, voice, theatre, solo-shows, choral conducting
  

“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”― Eckhart Tolle

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

Martha Postlewaite