When life feels overwhelming or tangled, you want a therapist who helps you feel understood quickly and gives you a clear way forward.

If you’re looking for counselling in Waterloo because you feel overwhelmed, burnt out, emotionally stuck, or unsure where to begin, you’re probably not looking for just any therapist. You want someone who helps you feel safe enough to be honest, thoughtful enough to see the bigger picture, and skilled enough to help you move forward. Karimeh Haddad, BASc, MA, MA, RP is a Registered Psychotherapist whose background in developmental psychology, psychotherapy, and psychometric assessment gives her a rare ability to see both the emotional pain you’re carrying and the patterns underneath it. She pays close attention to how stress, history, environment, identity, and the mind-body connection shape what you’re going through. From the first conversation, the goal is not to judge you, rush you, or flatten your experience into a label. It is to understand the full picture, honour the strengths you already have, and help you build practical, research-informed ways to feel more grounded, more empowered, and more like yourself again. You do not need to have everything figured out before your first session.

Karimeh Haddad, BASc, MA, MA, RP brings broad psychotherapy care and a deeper specialty lens that helps you feel seen as a whole person, not a set of symptoms.

As a psychotherapist serving Waterloo, Karimeh Haddad, BASc, MA, MA, RP provides comprehensive psychotherapy and counselling support for a wide range of concerns, including stress, anxiety, burnout, life transitions, emotional overwhelm, self-worth struggles, and trauma-related patterns that keep showing up in daily life. While she works broadly across psychotherapy concerns, you’ll also find particular depth in eating disorders and disordered eating support, giving you access to a therapist who can hold both the immediate issue and the deeper story underneath it. What makes her especially effective is that she does not separate symptoms from context. Her training in developmental psychology helps her understand how earlier experiences, family systems, culture, and environment can shape the way you cope today, while her clinical training keeps the work grounded in evidence-based change. The result is care that feels deeply human, culturally aware, and clinically clear.

You will not be pushed into a one-size-fits-all therapy plan because Karimeh takes time to understand your story, your patterns, and what change would actually look like for you.

With Karimeh, therapy does not start with a script. It starts with curiosity, collaboration, and a real conversation about what you are carrying, what is already working, and what meaningful change would look like for you. She works from the belief that you are the expert on your own life, so good counselling should never feel like something being done to you. Instead, she tailors the work using approaches such as CBT, DBT, Narrative Therapy, Solution-Focused Brief Therapy, ACT, and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy depending on what fits you best. That may mean learning practical skills for emotion regulation, challenging harsh thought patterns, understanding the stories you have internalized, or building a steadier relationship with stress, uncertainty, and self-compassion. She also pays attention to the full picture of your life, including your body, your environment, your culture, and your identities, because real psychotherapy works best when it reflects the person in the room. Within CARESPACE Weber North, Karimeh can also collaborate with other healthcare professionals when a more coordinated plan would help, so your care feels more connected and less fragmented.

Her credentials are not there to impress you from a distance because they shape the depth, structure, and safety of the care you receive.

Karimeh Haddad’s background gives your therapy both depth and range. She holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Honours Psychology from the University of Guelph, a Master of Arts in Developmental Psychology, and a Master of Arts in Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy from Wilfrid Laurier University. She is a Registered Psychotherapist with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario and is affiliated with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association and the Canadian Psychological Association. Professionally, she has delivered psychotherapy in collaborative care, trauma-informed practice, primary care, and group settings through CARESPACE Health+Wellness, Psychology Health Solutions, The Centre for Family Medicine, and Peel Psychology and Therapy Centre. She has also co-facilitated DBT-, EFT-, and CBT-based groups and helped develop a six-week mindful eating psychoeducation group. Her work in outpatient neuropsychology as a psychometrician further sharpens her ability to notice patterns in cognition, behaviour, and emotional functioning, adding another layer of precision to the way she thinks about your care. Ongoing training in anxiety-related disorders and 2SLGBTQ-inclusive care reinforces therapy that is evidence-based, respectful, and grounded in the real world.

If food, body image, guilt, or control have started taking up too much space in your life, Karimeh brings meaningful depth in eating disorder therapy without losing sight of the rest of you.

In addition to offering broad psychotherapy care, Karimeh brings meaningful depth in eating disorders and disordered eating support. If food has become a source of stress, guilt, control, numbness, shame, or constant mental noise, you already know how exhausting it can be to have something so basic feel so complicated. You may be living with restriction, bingeing, rigid food rules, body image distress, emotional eating, perfectionism, or the painful cycle of trying to “be good” and then feeling defeated when that plan collapses. Karimeh approaches this work with warmth, steadiness, and a refusal to reduce you to a behaviour. Her co-development and co-facilitation of a six-week mindful eating psychoeducation group speaks to a genuine clinical investment in helping you rebuild a more peaceful relationship with food and your body.

What makes this especially valuable is that she looks beyond eating patterns alone. Eating disorders and disordered eating often overlap with anxiety, self-criticism, trauma responses, identity stress, burnout, and the feeling that control is the only thing holding life together. Karimeh’s background in developmental psychology helps her explore how these patterns may have formed over time, while her psychotherapy training helps turn that insight into change. Depending on what you need, therapy may include CBT to challenge all-or-nothing thinking, DBT skills to manage urges and intense emotions, mindfulness to reconnect with body cues more safely, and narrative work to loosen shame-driven stories that no longer serve you. When appropriate, the coordinated CARESPACE model can also support a more connected plan if other forms of care would strengthen your progress.

The goal is not simply to change what happens at mealtimes. The deeper aim is to help you feel less ruled by fear, shame, or rigidity, more able to trust yourself, and more free to live your life without food or body image taking up so much space in it. And even if eating concerns are not the reason you first land on Karimeh’s page, this same depth in compassionate, shame-sensitive work can be powerfully helpful across many therapy concerns.

You do not have to keep carrying this alone when one appointment can begin changing the pattern.

Book with Karimeh Haddad today and give yourself the chance to feel more grounded, understood, and supported, because waiting rarely makes emotional pain quieter, but the right therapy can change what happens next.