Meet Amie Nelson, MSW, RSW

I’m Amie. I’m a Registered Social Worker and therapist in Calgary, and I’m glad you found your way here.

I was eighteen when I started on the path to social work, drawn to it for reasons I couldn’t name yet. Over the last 13 years, the work has taken me from grassroots community support, to families navigating intergenerational trauma in a rural community, to the Children’s Hospital Emergency Department. Through all of it, the same truth kept showing up: underneath so much of what we call anxiety, stuckness or feeling broken, there is grief that has never been named.

I learned that truth personally, too. My mom died suddenly seven years ago, shortly before I began my Master of Social Work. It felt like being pushed off the earth. I spent a long time trying to get back to the ground I’d stood on before, until I understood that grief doesn’t return us to the same place. It changes us. It changed me, and it changed how I sit with others in their pain.

Grief is at the heart of my work. Not only the grief that comes with death, but the losses no one sends flowers for: a relationship that ended, a parent you’ve had to step away from, the childhood you needed and didn’t get, a life that turned out differently than you pictured. So many people come to therapy asking, “What is wrong with me?” Often, the truer question is, “Look at what I’ve had to lose.” It’s okay to call this grief.

How I work. I see you in the context of your whole world: your relationships, your work, your childhood, and the systems you move through every day. That’s the social worker in me. I practise from an attachment-based, person-in-environment perspective, and I’m trained in Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART). Together, we’ll look gently at the patterns that once protected you, and make room for what you’ve been carrying alone. I won’t rush you, and I won’t try to fix you, because you aren’t broken. Sometimes the most important thing I can offer is to witness what’s true, and stay.

I work with individuals and couples carrying grief, complex trauma, childhood wounds, perfectionism and estrangement. I see clients in person at my office across from Chinook Mall, and online across Alberta, Ontario and Nova Scotia.

If something here feels familiar, you’re welcome to book a free consultation. We’ll talk about what’s bringing you in, and you can get a sense of whether I feel like the right fit. There’s no pressure to decide anything on the call.

Be gentle with yourself while you find your way.

Amie

Meet Amie Nelson, MSW, RSW I’m Amie. I’m a Registered Social Worker and therapist in Calgary, an... Read More