About Me
Dace Mars
M.Ed., Canadian Certified Counsellor
Hi, I’m a therapist who specializes in resolving painful contradictions.
These might be in your identity, through growing up with parents from completely different cultures. Or they could be your in your relationship needs, like the Fearful-Avoidant drives for wild passion vs vulnerable safety.
You’ve probably been taught that the only answer to these conflicts is compromise. To overrule your instincts with logic and the authority of others.
My approach is completely different: turning each inner conflict into a source of strength and pride. If you’re ready to change your story, let’s work together.
My Story
After getting my Masters, I practiced traditional psychotherapy for 5 years. In that time I helped people through all the standard things we get stuck with: depression, anxiety, shame. I even started my own clinic called Thrive, which ended up becoming one of the most successful in Canada.
But despite all that clinical experience, I still got my heart completely broken. Turns out, those communication skills and self-regulation techniques couldn’t handle how complicated real relationships were.
I dove into marriage counselling to find answers, eventually discovering Attachment Theory and the therapies that worked with it. But I wasn’t satisfied with what I found.
The vulnerability that was so healing for people in committed relationships somehow invited more pain when applied to singles in their 20s and 30s. And despite Attachment being proven cross-culturally, many of the relationship therapies working with it were based on Western, Christian assumptions about marriage. And worst of all, many of the therapists offering couples counselling were in bitterly unsatisfying relationships of their own.
With my own disorganized attachment style, and my Japanese-Croatian heritage, I realized that what was available just didn’t fulfill my longings.
Rather than give up on them, I set out to find out what worked in other cultures. Over the next six years I lived in a dozen countries, worked with hundreds of clients, and studied with psychiatrists, psychologists and even shamen.
And along the way, I pieced together the wisdom scattered all over the world. How the core wounds of each culture are all so similar, and the different solutions they found and problems it caused along the way.
By my thirteenth country, I finally had the answers I was looking for.
How to create something beautiful out of the traumas of your family.
And what really, really sets apart those satisfying relationships. Not one that just meets you at the level that society tells you to be satisfied with – but at every level.
It would be my honor to pass it on to you.