Ivania Salmeron, BA (Hons), MA, RP (Qualifying)
When grief, trauma, anxiety, or mood changes start shaping your days, you deserve care that feels steady from the first conversation
When you are carrying loss, trauma, anxiety, depression, emotional overwhelm, or the sense that your body is holding more than words can explain, it can be hard to know where to begin. Ivania Salmeron, BA (Hons), MA, RP (Qualifying), offers a compassionate, grounded space where you can slow down, feel heard, and begin making sense of what has been weighing on you.As a psychotherapist at CARESPACE Weber North, Ivania brings a trauma-informed, grief-aware, and psycho-somatically informed approach to counselling in Waterloo. Her work is shaped by the understanding that emotional pain is rarely “just in your head.” Loss can affect memory, identity, sleep, concentration, relationships, and your sense of safety in the world. Trauma can live in your nervous system long after the event has passed. Anxiety and mood changes can make everyday life feel smaller than it used to.
With Ivania, you do not have to explain everything perfectly before support can begin. You are met with warmth, cultural sensitivity, and a collaborative approach that honours your history, your body, your identity, and your pace.
Ivania Salmeron, BA (Hons), MA, RP (Qualifying), brings research-minded care together with a deeply human grief and trauma focus
Ivania Salmeron, BA (Hons), MA, RP (Qualifying), provides comprehensive psychotherapy care for a wide range of emotional, relational, and life-transition concerns, with particular depth in trauma, grief, anxiety, and mood-related challenges. Her background combines clinical training, bereavement support, psychological research, and community mental health experience, giving you care that is both emotionally attuned and thoughtfully structured.Her Master of Arts in Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy, her Honours Bachelor of Arts specialization in Psychology, and her clinical focus on trauma, grief, and loss help her understand distress from several angles at once: what happened, how it affected your nervous system, how it changed your relationships, and what meaning you are trying to rebuild now.
Ivania’s experience in research, grief education, group facilitation, and mental health administration also gives her a steady, organized way of working. You receive care that feels personal, but not vague; gentle, but not passive; supportive, but still focused on helping you move toward meaningful healing.
Your sessions with Ivania are designed to help you feel safe, understood, and actively supported—not analyzed from a distance
When you begin working with Ivania, your first sessions are about understanding what you are carrying and what you want life to feel like again. She listens for the emotional story, the body cues, the coping strategies that have helped you survive, and the places where those strategies may no longer be serving you. From there, she works with you to create a care plan that feels realistic, respectful, and aligned with your goals.Her approach to counselling may draw from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, Emotion-Focused Individual Therapy, Internal Family Systems, psychodynamic therapy, spiritually integrated therapy, grief counselling, and mind-body approaches. Because she has training in Brainspotting, she can also help you explore how unresolved trauma and emotional pain may be stored beyond conscious thought, allowing the work to move at a deeper nervous-system level when appropriate.
At CARESPACE Weber North, Ivania is part of a coordinated multidisciplinary model, which means your care can fit into a broader health plan when your emotional wellbeing is connected to sleep, pain, stress, nutrition, movement, or other areas of whole-person health.
Her education and training give you more than credentials—they give you a therapist who can connect emotion, memory, body, and meaning
Ivania’s academic and clinical path has been shaped by a consistent focus on how emotional pain changes the way you remember, relate, cope, and rebuild. Her Honours thesis explored the effects of grief symptoms on adult autobiographical memory recall, giving her a research-informed appreciation for why loss can make your own story feel fragmented, distant, or painfully vivid.Her Master of Arts in Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy included a clinical practicum focus on trauma, grief, and loss. That training supports a therapeutic style that can hold both emotional complexity and personal meaning, especially when you are trying to process experiences that do not fit into simple categories.
Ivania is registered with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario as an RP (Qualifying). She has completed Brainspotting Phase 1 training, sexual violence response training, AODA workplace wellbeing training, and trauma-focused training through the Attachment and Trauma Treatment Centre for Healing related to crisis situations, emergency response, and extreme states of stress. These credentials matter because they support care that is safer, more informed, and more responsive when your emotions feel intense, unpredictable, or difficult to name.
When trauma, grief, anxiety, or mood concerns have narrowed your life, Ivania helps you find room to breathe again
While Ivania provides comprehensive psychotherapy care, you will find especially deep experience in trauma, grief, anxiety, and mood concerns. These areas often overlap. Trauma can make your body feel constantly braced for danger. Grief can bring anxiety, numbness, guilt, anger, or exhaustion. Depression can appear after loss, chronic stress, identity disruption, or years of carrying pain alone. Ivania’s strength is helping you untangle these layers without reducing your experience to a label.In trauma-focused work, Ivania takes a paced and stabilizing approach. You are not pushed to relive painful memories before you have enough grounding, choice, and emotional safety. Through trauma-informed conversation, psycho-somatic awareness, Brainspotting-informed techniques, DBT skills, and compassionate reflection, she helps you notice what your nervous system is trying to protect you from and where healing may be possible. The goal is not to force the past away. It is to help the past stop running your present.
In grief counselling, Ivania brings uncommon depth. Her work with bereavement groups and grief education means she understands that loss is not something you “get over.” It changes routines, identity, memory, future plans, faith, family dynamics, and the way you understand yourself. With Ivania, grief work can include making space for sadness, exploring continuing bonds, navigating complicated emotions, and finding language for experiences others may not know how to sit with.
For anxiety and mood concerns, Ivania helps you build both insight and practical tools. CBT can help you recognize thought patterns that intensify fear or hopelessness. DBT can support emotional regulation when feelings surge quickly. Emotion-focused and parts-based approaches can help you understand the protective functions underneath anxiety, shutdown, irritability, or self-criticism. Over time, you can begin responding to yourself with more steadiness instead of fighting your own emotions every day.
