WHO WE ARE
About TJS Counselling
When Tina Smith was just a child, she wrote in her diary that she wanted to help people when she grew up. She was not confident at that age about what that entailed, but she knew in her heart that she wanted to bring people hope and healing. In 1997, Tina’s dream came to fruition after graduating from her first post-secondary school. She stepped into the world eager to learn and walk alongside people. If you were to converse with Tina, you would often hear her say, “My clients have been my greatest teachers beyond my education.”
Tina gained incredible experiences in an array of not-for-profit organizations and private counselling that led to her establishing her counselling practice in May of 2011 called Tina J. Smith Counselling & Psychotherapy. At the end of 2011, Tina’s son relapsed with high-risk leukemia, which resulted in stepping away for one year to focus all her care on him. Her experiences of facing difficult circumstances led to her receiving support, confirming that accepting help from others was integral to our healing journey. As a result, she began to ensure she continued to be educated and provide people with research-based treatment methods integrated with an always relational approach.
Tina’s practice grew to have a waitlist, which caused her heart to be heavy as more people needed help. It was when Tina decided to hire her first associate and change the name to Tina J. Smith & Associates Counselling & Psychotherapy. Since 2011, Tina has grown to have a large team of compassionate Registered Psychotherapists and Registered Social Workers rooted in faith, hope, and love established in relationships as a team and with clients.
Over the years of supporting people, she continued to notice the financial barriers that determined the duration and access to research-based healing and recovery treatment methods. It was in 2020 that Tina was determined to find a solution to this barrier and hired a Not-For-Profit Charitable Lawyer to establish a practice that provides subsidized mental health treatment. In 2022, Tina was granted Not-For-Profit Charitable Status for an additional organization called Selah Treatment Center to provide funded mental health treatment. Tina has maintained that people deserve the most effective treatment wrapped in a relationship. People deserve to experience compassionate and loving support from trained professionals. Tina’s faith as a Believer in Jesus has been the greatest why she has sought to bring hope and healing, as she knows that despite the confusion and pain in this world, people are deeply loved beyond this world. Tina has sought to establish both the private clinic and the not-for-profit charitable organization through faith, hope, and love that is not dependent on whether people share her Christian faith. It is about loving people. Recently, Tina published a book called “Renewing our Minds in Love: Integrating Neuroscience and Scripture for Wholeness and Healing” to bring confirmation that we are designed to heal. Tina and her incredible team passionately seek to create an atmosphere that meets people where they are without judgement but with a disposition that says welcome, “You are safe.” We will continue to develop practices that affirm and confirm that we are “designed to heal.”