Dawn Serra

Specialties: Trauma, relationships, Body Trust®, body liberation, pleasure, confidence, boundaries, anxiety, adults who were parentified children, perimenopause, therapy for therapists, and couples counseling

  • Licensure: RCC, CCC

  • Pronouns: she/her

  • Social location: White, cisgender, superfat, disabled, neurodivergent, queer

  • Languages spoken: English

Hello! I am so glad you’re here. As co-founder and co-owner of Tend and Cultivate Counselling, it has long been a dream of mine to offer trauma-informed, weight-neutral, radical mental health care (particularly for those in larger and marginalized bodies).

Counselling is my second career, embarked upon in my early 40s while running two businesses and navigating perimenopause and chronic pain. In other words, this is not something I fell into by chance, but instead something I committed to from a place of deep passion, life experience, and desire.

I believe my clients are incredibly wise and I approach counselling as a collaborative endeavor that centers your lived experience. I trust you are the expert in your life and position myself as someone joining you on a journey of healing.

I specialize in:

  • therapy for therapists & counsellors (yep, we need therapy, too!)
  • couples counselling
  • Body Trust® and coming home to yourself
  • body shame and internalized fatphobia
  • disordered eating and atypical anorexia (AAN)
  • connecting with and understanding your pleasure
  • boundaries, self-acceptance, worthiness, taking up space
  • play, joy, and satisfaction
  • mismatched libido and desire, communication in relationships
  • trauma
  • complex post traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD)
  • anxiety & depression

The nexus of my work is the places where we are most tender and what brings us to life – after all, our wounds deserve tending but what makes life worth living is the joy, pleasure, connection, satisfaction, and passion we cultivate each and every day.

I strive to be affirming for non-monogamous/polyamorous, kinky, aromantic, asexual, neurodivergent, and transgender/nonbinary folks.

Trainings and Certifications

  • 2025 – Somatic Experiencing (enrolled)

  • 2024 – NuMethod Trauma-Sensitive Facilitation Levels 1, 2, & 3 with Carmen Spagnola

  • 2024 – Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) with Janina Fisher

  • 2023 – EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) Therapy

  • 2023 – IFS and Neurodiversity with Tara Watters and Mel Galbraith
  • 2023 – EDRD Pro – Eating Disorder Foundations
  • 2023 – Grief and Loss – Advanced IFS with IFSCA

  • 2022 – Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO) Couples Counselling with Liz Phillips

  • 2022 – Advanced Internal Family Systems (IFS) with IFSCA

  • 2022 – Internal Family Systems 16-week Stepping Stones

  • 2022 – Treating Complex PTSD with Internal Family Systems (Dr. Frank Anderson)

  • 2022 – Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) – 4-Day Externship

  • 2022 – Narrative Therapy Approaches to Trauma (VSNT)

  • 2022 – Integrative Somatic Internal Family Systems Levels 1, 2, and 3 (The Embody Lab)

  • 2022 – Internal Family Systems (IFS) 6-month Circle (IFS Institute)

  • 2021 – Justice-Doing in Private/Alternative Practice (Vikki Reynolds)

  • 2021 – Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism (Education for Racial Equality with Resmaa Menakem)

  • 2020 – Anti-Racist Summer School (African-American Policy Forum)

  • 2020 – Mad World: Abolition, Psychiatry, And New Horizons with Elliott Fukui (Fireweed Collective)

  • 2019 – Liberatory Accountability (Tepeyac Consulting)

  • 2018 – Certified Body Trust® Specialist (Center for Body Trust)

  • 2018 – Narrative Therapy 5-Day Foundations (Vancouver School of Narrative Therapy – VSNT)

  • 2017 – Relational Life Couples Therapy Level 1 & 2 (Relational Life Institute)

  • 2017 – Erotic Film School with Madison Young

  • 2016 – Gottman Method Couples Therapy Level 1 & 2 (Gottman Institute)

  • 2015 – Sex Geek Summer Camp & Sex Education Bootcamp Levels 1, 2, & 3

“Dawn is such a gift to this world as a healer. I highly recommend working with her. She’s so rooted in this work, so embodied and so well studied. She doesn’t have to do much to help me make big shifts: she just has to bring all that wisdom and her being shines so much to light for me. She’s so so so good at making space for what’s present. I almost want to tell you not to hire her, bc I want her to myself… but you should hire her or at least check her out.”

Client

Anonymous

EDRD Pro Member Badge
Certified Body Trust Provider logo. The center is a lime green tree with a brown hand as the trunk. Around the outside is a ring with the words Certified Body Trust Provider.
Logo for Intimacy from the Inside Out. There is a blue swirl behind the words in the top left corner.
Logo for Internal Family Systems. The letters I, F, and S are around three curves