A therapist who meets you where you are.
Caroline Lao Se Mai is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) offering virtual individual therapy to adults and young adults across Ontario. She works in French, English, and Spanish, and brings a warm, client-centred approach grounded in evidence-based practice and genuine curiosity about each person's story.
Caroline is completing her Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology at Yorkville University, where she also holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the Université de Montréal. Her clinical experience spans anxiety, depression, ADHD, trauma, stress, self-esteem, life transitions, and relationship challenges — with a particular sensitivity to racial identity, cultural context, and the lived experiences of immigrant communities.
Before training as a therapist, Caroline spent years on the front lines of mental health support: as a bilingual crisis responder with Kids Help Phone, a volunteer with the Military Family Resource Centre, a research assistant on postpartum depression prevention, and a coach supporting families navigating economic hardship. That background shapes how she works — with steadiness, cultural humility, and the ability to hold difficult things with care.
Areas of Clinical Support
Anxiety & Stress
Support for overthinking, constant worry, and feeling mentally overwhelmed.
Anxiety has a way of making everything feel urgent — the mental loops that won't quiet down, the physical tension you carry without realizing it, the exhausting effort of trying to hold it all together. Caroline works with adults and young adults in Ontario who are living with generalized anxiety, social anxiety, performance anxiety, and chronic stress. Together, you'll explore what's driving the worry beneath the surface and build practical tools to interrupt the cycle — so that life starts to feel more manageable, and less like something you're constantly bracing for.
ADHD & Focus
Practical strategies for focus, routines, emotional regulation, and self-compassion.
Living with ADHD as an adult often means years of feeling like you're working twice as hard for half the results — and wondering why the strategies that work for everyone else don't seem to work for you. Caroline offers therapy for adults and young adults navigating ADHD, including those who received a late diagnosis and are still making sense of what that means. Sessions focus on building sustainable routines, understanding emotional dysregulation, and — crucially — shifting the narrative from self-blame to self-understanding. ADHD is not a character flaw. Therapy can help you work with your brain rather than against it.
Self-Esteem & Identity
Support in building confidence and understanding your sense of self.
A shaky sense of self can show up in many ways: chronic self-doubt, difficulty making decisions, feeling like you don't quite belong, or struggling to know what you actually want. For many clients, these patterns have roots in early experiences, cultural pressures, or years of masking and people-pleasing. Caroline provides a space to explore identity, self-worth, and confidence — including the unique dimensions of racial identity and cultural belonging for clients navigating those experiences. This work isn't about positive thinking. It's about genuinely understanding who you are and learning to trust yourself.
Life Transitions
Guidance through changes in relationships, career, school, or major life shifts.
Transitions — even welcome ones — can unsettle us in ways we don't always expect. Finishing school, starting a new career, ending or beginning a relationship, moving cities, becoming a parent, or simply arriving at a stage of life that doesn't look the way you imagined: all of these can bring grief, disorientation, and pressure to figure it out fast. Caroline works with adults and young adults moving through periods of change, helping them find steadiness, clarify what they actually want, and navigate the uncertainty that comes with becoming someone new.
Relationships & Communication
Support with boundaries, conflict, and feeling more secure in your relationships.
Relationships can be a source of deep comfort — and deep pain. Whether you're struggling with patterns of conflict, difficulty setting limits, fear of abandonment, or simply not feeling heard, therapy can help you understand what's happening beneath the surface of your relational life. Drawing on attachment-informed and emotionally focused approaches, Caroline helps clients identify their relational patterns, communicate more effectively, and build more secure and honest connections — with others, and with themselves.
Depression & Low Mood
A space to work through low energy, disconnection, and feeling stuck.
Depression doesn't always look like sadness. For many people it looks like flatness — a loss of interest in things that used to matter, difficulty getting started, a quiet sense of disconnection from yourself and the people around you. Caroline offers therapy for adults in Ontario who are living with depression, low mood, and the particular heaviness of feeling stuck. Using evidence-based approaches including behavioural activation, CBT, and ACT, sessions focus on gently rebuilding momentum, reconnecting with meaning, and addressing the underlying patterns that keep people feeling trapped.
Perinatal & Postpartum Mental Health
Support for anxiety, depression, and emotional overwhelm during pregnancy and the postpartum period.
The transition into parenthood can be one of the most disorienting experiences of a person's life — even when it's wanted and planned. Anxiety during pregnancy, postpartum depression, identity shifts, relationship strain, and the quiet grief of not feeling the way you expected to feel are all more common than most people are told. Caroline brings both clinical training and direct research experience in perinatal mental health, having spent two years supporting pregnant women navigating anxiety and depression as part of a hospital-based intervention study at CHU Sainte-Justine. She understands this terrain with both evidence-based grounding and genuine care. If you're pregnant, newly postpartum, or still carrying the weight of that period long after it ended, therapy can offer a space to be honest about what it's actually been like.
Caroline offers virtual therapy to adults and young adults across Ontario, with evening and weekend availability, in French, English, and Spanish.
Therapeutic Approaches & Modalities
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
Motivational Interviewing (MI)
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
DBT Skills
Gottman Method (Levels 1 & 2)
Mindfulness-Based Approaches
Why Work With Caroline?
She brings both clinical training and real-world experience.
Before becoming a therapist, Caroline spent years working directly with people in crisis and in vulnerable life stages — as a bilingual crisis responder with Kids Help Phone, a researcher supporting pregnant women with anxiety and depression, and a community agent working with immigrant families. That background shapes how she works: with steadiness, cultural humility, and the ability to hold difficult things without flinching.
She works across languages and cultures.
Caroline offers therapy in French, English, and Spanish — and brings genuine cultural responsiveness to her work with diverse communities, including immigrant populations and individuals navigating racial identity. Feeling understood in the language and cultural context that fits you matters. It's not an afterthought here.
She adapts to you, not the other way around.
Caroline doesn't apply a single framework to every client. She draws from a wide range of evidence-based approaches — EFIT, CBT, ACT, IFS, DBT, and more — and shapes each therapeutic relationship around what that specific person actually needs. If something isn't working, she'll say so and adjust.
She makes therapy accessible.
Virtual sessions, evening and weekend availability, and direct billing with Medavie Blue Cross, Green Shield, and SSQ mean that practical barriers to getting support are reduced as much as possible. Therapy should be something you can actually access.
She's genuinely invested in meaningful change.
Caroline is drawn to work that goes deeper than symptom reduction — toward helping clients understand themselves, shift longstanding patterns, and build a life that actually feels like theirs. If that's what you're looking for, you'll likely find her a good fit.
Let’s see if this feels like the right fit.
Starting therapy can feel like a big step. A free consultation gives you space to ask questions and see if working together feels comfortable.
