About Solaleh Amini

My name is Solaleh Amini. I'm a Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO #13684) and a Canadian Certified Counsellor, with a Master's in Counselling Psychology and a background in Therapeutic Recreation. I work with adults across Ontario, in English and in Farsi.

I grew up in a culture where talking openly about mental health was not the norm. Struggle was carried quietly, managed alone, and not named — not out of cruelty, but because naming it was understood to reflect badly on you and on the people around you.

I watched people I loved go years without support that would have changed things for them. The reason was almost never that help didn't exist. It was that asking for it felt like an admission.

That is why SolPsy Center exists. I wanted to build a place where the hardest thing you're carrying can be said out loud to someone who won't flinch at it, won't judge it, and won't reduce you to it. Not a place where you are assessed and managed — a place where you are heard first, and where nothing you bring is treated as too much or too small.

A lot of what people tell me here, they have never told anyone. They arrive apologizing for taking up time, or braced for a reaction that doesn't come. Watching someone realize partway through a session that they can stop performing — that this is a room where they don't have to be fine — is the part of this work I care about most.

I don't believe therapy is only for crisis, and I don't believe you need a reason serious enough to justify it. If something in your life isn't working and you'd like to understand it better, that is reason enough to reach out.

 I work with adults across Ontario who, from the outside, appear to be doing fine.

You're functional. You meet the deadlines, answer the messages, show up for the people who need you. What nobody sees is the cost of it — rehearsing conversations before they happen, replaying them for hours afterward, the low background sense of having done something wrong without being able to say what. You've been the reliable one long enough that people have stopped asking how you're doing.

Some of what I hear most often:

• I can't tell whether I'm anxious or whether this is just who I am.
• I'm exhausted, and I can't point to a reason that would sound serious enough.
• I say yes to things I don't want to do, and then resent myself for it.
• Nothing I do feels like enough, even when I can see that it objectively is.
• I don't actually know what I want. I only know what's expected of me.
• I used to enjoy things, and I can't remember when that stopped.

Many of the people I work with are carrying this alongside expectations they never chose — family expectations, cultural ones, or the particular load of being the first in a family to do something. Some are students. Some are early in careers that already feel unsustainable. Some are years in, quietly wondering whether this is it.

And if you're currently wondering whether what you're dealing with is bad enough to warrant therapy: that is one of the most common questions I'm asked. You don't have to be in crisis to want your life to feel different.