Jess Picco, MA (She/Her/Hers)
Available for sessions in-person or online Sunday evenings in Port Moody and Tuesdays and Wednesdays in Vancouver
Pre-Registered Counsellor and Community-Based Practitioner
Works with adults and youth through individual and relationship counselling. Offering lower-cost services while awaiting official registration.
Hi there! You’ve found a space where life’s messy and beautiful parts can peacefully coexist. I encourage nuance, sparked in my own queerness and experience supporting neurodivergent folx, and welcome anyone seeking a place to pause, explore, and reshape what truly matters to them. Many of the folx I support are questioning the “rules” they’ve been given about who they should be. They’re often navigating changes in identity and relationships, shifts that are deeply connected, and feel the weight of those changes in their bodies, whether through burnout, grief, or the sense of not fitting into systems around them. Together, we’ll slow down to tune into your relationships, connect with your body and emotions, and reflect on the rich identities, communities, experiences, and questions that guide the growth and changes you want in your life.
My approach to counselling makes space for you, your relationships, and awareness of the systems around you. I centre you in the healing—your pace, values, and the stories that shape you—and I tend to explore these layers through metaphors, visuals, and questions. I believe my role is to provide structure to allow you to discover and strengthen the inner resources that you already possess, while experimenting with tools and narratives that fit your unfolding story. I see counselling as one piece to the puzzle, and our time together will also explore how to build in support and resources that are with you for the long run.
To give you some context on who I am, how I got here, and why that matters: I am a cisqueer, nondisabled, white woman of Italian and British/English heritage. I was born and raised on the unceded (meaning stolen) and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples in so-called North Vancouver and in recent years moved to the territories of the Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) and q̓ic̓əy̓ (kat-zee)peoples in so-called Coquitlam. My upbringing and cultural roots, as well as my family experiences—especially growing up with a parent with mental illness—shape how I understand wellness. Our mental health systems are difficult to navigate and I know how crucial relationships and community are to our wellbeing and building bridges to support in our porous system.
Beyond my counselling hat, I am a community co-creator and moving soul. I’ve played team sports all my life—most influentially rugby and soccer—navigating the challenges and cheers of those spaces as they intersect with my queer identity and love for contexts that celebrate a woman’s strength and strategy. I am inspired by community events that centre diverse voices through art and story, specifically ones that push beyond the social ‘boxes’ or remind us of the historically and beautifully celebrated identities predating colonial oppression. Alongside these passions, I balance my time with cooking a vegan dish and burning through reality tv, staying active outside with friends, and making art with no direction.
Finding a counsellor that aligns who you are, the resources you have access to, and what you hope to build is a tricky intersection. If you’ve felt seen or curious here, I’d love to offer a free consultation to connect and explore what your messy beauty might want to become.
Abby Chow, MA, RCC-ACS (She/Her)
Available for sessions online Sunday-Wednesday, in person in Vancouver on Tuesdays, and in person in Port Moody on Sundays
Art, Somatic + EMDR Practitioner Registered Clinical Counsellor.
Works with Practitioners, Businesses, and Adults Individually and in groups, Clinical Director.
Welcome, I’m so glad you’re connected - you don’t have to wade through this isolating, demanding, sometimes heartbreaking world alone! Whether you’re grieving what you’ve envisioned for your life or the dumpster fire that is this world, feeling weighted down by constantly questioning your place and where you belong; whether you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, harmful relational contexts or the body you once knew because of chronic pain & fatigue, I can help.
I specialize in working through this intricate interconnection between identity, purpose and grief. Many folx I work with have also experienced histories of trauma (not just trauma with a capital T) and have had to navigate invalidating and minimizing environments. In working together, we can co-create sustainable systems of self-exploration and relational engagement so that you can connect to rootedness in joy and groundedness in purpose, while reconnecting with the lineage of resistance to create the world that could be.
A little about me: I’m a cisqueer, working-turned-middle class, half-gen, currently non-disabled, straight-sized settler from Hong Kong who lives with chronic pain and ADHD. I found my way to this work through exploring and navigating my own relational trauma through the lens of privilege and systemic oppression.
For the last decade, I’ve had the privilege of working with folx resisting multiple systems of oppression, which often manifests as being impacted by the criminal punishment system, addictions, and relational trauma. Through our work we’ve dissected the paradoxes of life, cultivating growth and healing by exploring the stories we subscribe to and the stories we tell. My approach centers on co-creating spaces of change by cultivating a culture of compassionate curiosity and discernment; often with a dose of humor and creativity (and lots of questions!). We look at your experience through an intersectional, systemic, and political context, often incorporating things like EMDR, Art, and Somatic work to further contextualize your exploration, compassion, and growth.
While I am continually engaging in direct clinical work with clients within a counselling context, most of my work now revolves around providing clinical supervision and business consulting services from a justice-grounded perspective. Many practitioners are not supported in accessing business development education, let alone one that is in alignment with our ethics, our knowing, and the world we are trying to create. If you relate to this, my role is to support you in developing a sustainable practice without having to sacrifice the ethics you hold dear.
In addition to my work here at Venturous, I am a board member of Healing in Colour; teach and supervise counsellors-in-training at Adler University and Vancouver Community College; and founded Reflecting on Justice, a mutual aid/wealth redistribution-based virtual platform for therapists to unlearn systemic oppression within ourselves and our profession, through community with other therapists. To ensure continual alignment with ethical practice, I engage in ongoing clinical supervision with Vikki Reynolds.
Outside of work I have a passion for creating + learning, video games, comedy + live music. I’m also currently writing a book that critiques the Eurocentric ideology of familial love within a therapeutic context as grounded in my father’s experience as a refugee and explored through an intergenerational lens.
Additional Training:
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Immersion Program
- Applied Polyvagal Theory in Yoga Level 1 + 2
- Anti-blackness and anti-fatness: A 201 level teach in - Mary Senyonga
- Building Capacity for Mutual Aid - Dean Spade, Barnard Center for Research on Women
- Collaborative Teams: Creating Cultures of Accountability, Structuring Safety & Justice-Doing in Community Work
- Complex Trauma Certification (CCTP/CCTP-II) - Janina Fischer
- Critical Incident Stress Management
- Embodied Conflict Resolution with Kai Cheng Thom
- Emotion-Focused Family Therapy Core Training - Dr. Adele LeFrance
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Core Foundations
- Expressive Arts Therapy: Creative Solutions for Trauma Recovery
- Feminisms, Intersectionality and Narrative Practice - Dulwich Center
- Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism - Education for Racial Equity, Resmaa Menakem
- Free Up! Abolition & Transformative Justice Series Rania El Mugammar + Guest Facilitators
- Gottman Method Couples Therapy Level 1: Bridging the Couple Chasm
- HSABC Learn + Connect Series on Homelessness
- Indigenous gender diversity: creating culturally relevant and gender-affirming services - (PHSA)
- Institute for Radical Permission - adrienne maree brown + Sonya Renee Taylor
- Internal Family Systems: Clinical Applications
- Narrative Therapy Foundations - Vancouver School of Narrative Therapy
- Nonviolent Crisis Intervention
- San’yas Indigenous Cultural Safety Training; Core ICS Mental Health - Provincial Health Services Authority
- Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Body Oriented Therapy Techniques for Trauma and Attachment
- Sexualities, genders and narrative practice: A narrative therapy queer space - Dulwich Center
- Supervision of Solidarity: Clinical Supervision Training, Vikki Reynolds, Dương Ocean Đặng
- Taming the Hungry Ghosts: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Addictions
- The Body Image Course: Helping Every Body find Peace with Food and Weight
- Trauma and Resistance: Innovative Responses to Oppression, Violence, and Suffering
- Violence Prevention & Intervention Training Program – Battered Women’s Support Services
In the Media:
- Radical Therapist Podcast
- The Signal Magazine: Who is Caring for Mental Health Workers?
- Go Solo Entrepreneurial Magazine
