Tianna Baron, SSW, BSW, RSW
When anxiety, big emotions, school stress, or a hard life transition start taking over daily life, you want a therapist who understands both the feelings underneath and the real-world impact they’re having on home, school, work, and relationships.
If you’re looking for counselling in Waterloo, Tianna Baron, SSW, BSW, RSW offers a warm, steady, and practical approach that helps you feel safe enough to be honest and supported enough to make progress. Whether you’re reaching out for yourself or trying to find the right support for your child or teen, Tianna brings a combination that can be hard to find: psychotherapy training, trauma-informed care, and direct school-based experience supporting young people through emotional regulation challenges, behavioural struggles, and what many families describe as “big emotions.”Tianna works with a wide range of concerns, including anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, trauma, emotional dysregulation, behaviour challenges, ADHD, autism-related needs, suicidal ideation, and difficult life transitions. Because she has supported children, teens, and young adults both in therapy and in school settings, she understands how these struggles show up in real life — in classrooms, routines, homework, friendships, family stress, shutdowns, outbursts, and the quiet moments when everything feels heavier than it looks from the outside.
Tianna Baron, SSW, BSW, RSW provides comprehensive counselling and psychotherapy support — with exceptional depth when anxiety, regulation, neurodivergence, trauma, and life changes overlap.
Tianna Baron, SSW, BSW, RSW is a Registered Social Worker and therapist who offers broad, full-scope mental health support within her practice. You are not limited to one narrow issue when you book with her. She helps with the full range of concerns that bring you to therapy, while also bringing particular depth in anxiety and depression, behaviours and emotional regulation, trauma-focused care, ADHD, and major transitions.What makes her especially effective is how quickly she builds trust while staying practical. Her experience with the Waterloo Region District School Board gave her a front-row understanding of how emotional and behavioural challenges affect learning, routines, confidence, peer relationships, and family life. That means you are not just meeting with someone who can talk about emotions in theory. You are working with someone who understands how those emotions show up in everyday settings — and how to translate therapy into support that actually fits daily life.
What therapy with Tianna feels like is calm, collaborative, and grounded in tools you can use long after the session ends.
From the first conversation, Tianna focuses on helping you feel heard without feeling judged or rushed. Her counselling approach is trauma-informed, relational, and evidence-based, which means she pays attention not only to what is happening on the surface, but also to the patterns, experiences, triggers, and unmet needs underneath it. She helps you make sense of what you are feeling, why it may be happening, and what can start to shift.Tianna draws from cognitive behavioural therapy, solution-focused therapy, mindfulness-based strategies, play-informed work, and ABA-informed approaches when they fit your goals. That matters when you are trying to move from daily overwhelm into practical change — whether that means calming anxious thoughts, recognizing triggers sooner, improving emotional regulation, building school and home routines, or developing strategies for focus and organization. Because she works within the collaborative care model at CARESPACE Uptown Waterloo, your support can also connect with other professionals when a more coordinated plan will help you feel more fully supported.
Her professional training, school board experience, and crisis-intervention preparation mean you are working with someone who knows how to stay steady when life feels anything but steady.
Tianna’s education includes a Social Service Worker diploma from Sheridan College, Social Development Studies at the University of Waterloo, and an Honours Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Waterloo. She is a Registered Social Worker whose background includes providing counselling for children, teens, and young adults in multidisciplinary care, along with direct work in school and youth-support environments where emotional, social, and behavioural needs had to be understood in context rather than reduced to a label.Her professional experience includes therapist work at Niilo Wellness, Child & Youth Worker experience with the Waterloo Region District School Board, Educational Assistant work supporting students with hearing impairments and other disabilities, and youth work in residential settings where de-escalation, behavioural support, and crisis response were part of day-to-day care. She is trained in Behavioural Management System, SafeTalk, Non-Violent Crisis Intervention, and ASSIST suicide intervention. Tianna also brings Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) training, which strengthens her ability to support emotional regulation, skill-building, routines, and behaviour patterns in practical, measurable ways that matter outside the therapy room.
If you are carrying anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism-related challenges, trauma, suicidal thoughts, or emotions that feel too big to manage alone, this is where Tianna’s added depth becomes especially meaningful.
In addition to providing comprehensive psychotherapy and counselling support, Tianna brings particular depth in the areas families and young adults often find hardest to explain: anxiety that shows up as avoidance, perfectionism, panic, irritability, or constant overthinking; depression that looks like withdrawal, numbness, exhaustion, hopelessness, or low motivation; and emotional regulation struggles that can turn an ordinary day into a series of meltdowns, shutdowns, arguments, or overwhelming reactions.Her school board background and ABA-informed lens are especially valuable when behaviour is only the visible part of the struggle. Big behaviour often grows out of stress, skill gaps, fear, sensory overload, shame, frustration, or a nervous system that has been carrying too much for too long. Tianna helps you look underneath the behaviour so you can build stronger coping tools, clearer communication, healthier routines, and more confidence at home and at school instead of staying stuck in blame, confusion, or power struggles.
Tianna also has meaningful experience supporting ADHD — including what many families still refer to as ADD — especially when focus, organization, impulsivity, emotional intensity, school performance, or self-esteem are part of the picture. She helps you or your child develop practical strategies for planning, follow-through, attention, and regulation so daily life feels less chaotic and more manageable. When Level 1 Autism Spectrum Disorder is part of what you are navigating, she brings a supportive, respectful approach that can help with social-emotional understanding, transitions, coping skills, communication, and the emotional toll of feeling misunderstood or overwhelmed.
Her trauma-focused care is just as important when you have learned to survive by staying on guard, shutting down, people-pleasing, or reacting fast because your nervous system never really gets to relax. Rather than treating those responses as flaws, Tianna helps you understand where they may come from and how to build safer, steadier ways of coping. Her ASSIST training in suicide intervention also adds another layer of preparedness when suicidal ideation or serious mental health concerns are part of the conversation, helping difficult moments be met with calm, clarity, and thoughtful next-step support. And when life transitions are part of what is making everything feel heavier — a new school, family change, relationship shift, identity development, or the move into adulthood — she helps you feel less lost in the change and more equipped to move through it.
