My History

My name is David Fairweather and I am a certified psychotherapist. I offer insight oriented therapy to couples and individuals wishing to improve the quality of their lives, their mental health, their sense of self, and relationships in some way. Softly focused on your thoughts and feelings, we will work together to understand your specific situation with all its complexities and explore the courses of action that may help you on your life journey.

Without reference to your past, you would be reborn in each moment without any idea what to think or do! Our past experiences become reference points for us that provide us with the capacity to evolve safely, avoiding future pain by recognizing potential threats. We make unconscious judgements in the blink of an eye and often limit our own lives, relationships and experiences without awareness. Every experience in your life, is only your perception of that experience, since we can all experience the same thing (a song on the radio, a book, or a movie) very differently. Same song, same book, same movie, yet the perception that you have, will be referenced unconsciously to your past and filtered through your own subjectivity.

Yet ever changing.

David Fairweather ever changing

When we consciously choose to explore our past experiences and invest time analyzing the ways in which our subjective reference points either help or hinder us in life, the road ahead can offer destinations currently unimaginable to our unconsciously constructed view of reality as we know it. As with each of us, I began by growing into my previous path, the only path seemingly available to me, but after many years of self-reflection, psychoanalysis, self-hypnosis and meditation, I’ve grown to define my own path, a mindful path I look forward to sharing with you.

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My Beginnings

I am a Registered Psychotherapist, practicing psychodynamic approaches to; individual psychotherapy, couples therapy and hypnotherapy. My practice reflects a balance of my spiritual and scientific education and experiences. Balance is important to me. One of my favourite artistic mediums is photography, a balance of technology and artistry, camera and artist. So naturally, a college education in photography was my first great Canadian achievement. But let me start at the beginning.

I was born and grew up in England, an artist by nature, engineer by nurture, art and music have always been an interest of mine, but science was more stable, and at the time I needed security. Following in my Grandfather’s footsteps, I graduated from my local aerospace engineering college in England, finding my naturally analytical nature (I love to figure out how stuff works) and attention to detail (the more you understand the better as far as I’m concerned), well suited to the problem solving and highly technical environment of engineering. All those very same traits were later to be better expressed in my coaching and therapy career, but again, I’m jumping ahead.

My long-standing interest in the psychology of thought processes and my innate ability to help others understand concepts that previously baffled them, was initially expressed in, and quite well suited to, a career in teaching managers, blue collar factory workers and white collar office staff how to work smart not hard, in addition to authoring several technical manuals and instructional aids. My college education had provided me with various communication courses, workplace management classes and a sound background in industrial relations along with a firm understanding of the legalities of employment, which sparked an interest in employment equity. I started serving on an office committee, mediating the working conditions and employee rights of engineering professionals between staff and management, but I was about to spread my wings and venture out into the big wide world.

I began a career in corporate consulting, developing and facilitating workshops in addition to providing technical support and process advice to many of the world’s leaders in aerospace and automotive design in the U.S, Europe and Canada, having been offered the opportunity to travel and teach by a Canadian company, eager to profit from my expertise. I chose to make my home in Ontario Canada and since then, I have spent the second half of my life so far, following my heart in an educational blend of artistic, spiritual and academic pursuits, becoming the mindful therapist I am at this moment. Still interested in equity, just not only at work.

My Journey

I made Canada my home, and since that turning point in my life, a great deal of my time has been spent in meditation, self-hypnosis and silent reflection, much of it engaged in my own therapy and personal growth. I also began a degree in Psychology at York University followed by the addition of Philosophy as a second major. A fairly lengthy and significant personal experience with chronic pain provided me with many insights into the mind-body connection that have been a wonderful opportunity for me to discover a new balance throughout the many changes I have made in my life so far. Not content with a purely academic and intellectual education, I also sought to expand my horizons by taking on a spiritually based counselling program that resulted in a non-secular doctoral degree in metaphysics. It doesn’t permit me to refer to myself as “Dr.” given its non-secular nature, but it has afforded me a wealth of experiential insights that influence many aspects of my work.

My post graduate level psychotherapy training was conducted by the Toronto Institute for Relational Psychotherapy (TIRP). You could consider me a relational therapist, but things are rarely so simple. Drawn to the mind-body connection, hypnosis was the first formal training in a therapeutic discipline that I engaged in, followed by a growing client list benefitting from the insights, motivation and direction that self-hypnosis offers. I am informed by a number of psychological theories such as intersubjectivity, humanism, feminism, object relations and self psychology, all inherently psychodynamic and relational modalities.

I have studied the science of stress in great depth. Initially in college from an mechanical, engineering perspective, later followed by an organic perspective. My post-graduate level studies with the Canadian Institute of Stress, founded by Canadian Father of stress, Hans Selye, have significantly informed and moulded my therapist self. I have also studied many empirical research based relaxation strategies in addition to studying the art of meditation instruction under the master guidance of the Lord Abbot of one of Thailand’s most esteemed group of temples.

I have both trained and taught in colleges, university, government offices temples and institutions. I continue to engage in self-development, viewing self-development as a life long commitment, after all, you can never know everything. In addition to my private therapy practice where I see individuals and couples weekly, I have developed several anxiety reduction workshops for York University’s Faculty of Health, School of Nursing, where I have been employed to facilitate anxiety reduction workshops and conduct anxiety and technology based research for the university.