About our Practice

As stated in the name, New Authorship is a Narrative Therapy practice that offers Narrative talk-therapy, Narrative based sex therapy, and Narrative based relationship/couples(+) therapy. On the surface this may not mean much, but I want to take time to tell you what this means you can expect of the Narrative Therapy as practiced in this context.

Narrative Therapy & Contemporary Feminist Narrative Therapy

Narrative Therapy (NT), as a therapeutic discipline, originated from the work of David Epston and Michael White and has been taken up in various ways and forms by thousands of practitioners since. I, Heather Samarron (M.S.W, R.S.W) am one such practitioner.

I fell in love with Narrative Therapy because NT theorizes that we can explore our experiences through stories because we humans tend to carry them with us in story form. However, unlike the stories trapped in our books, these are living stories: They’re unfinished, everchanging, and invite us to re-author our own identities outside the confines of the problem. One might say, I am here to support you as you create opportunities for New Authorship in your life! (See what I did there?)

To be even more specific about the NT practiced at New Authorship, I practice Contemporary Feminist Narrative Therapy as taught to me by my incredible educators, mentors, and colleagues at the Calgary Narrative Collective*. What this means is that not only are we going to look at the problems popping up in your life, but we’re going to look at the larger social contexts that we all live within and how they may be conspiring with the problem. We don’t all have the same access to life choices and chances, for a great many reasons, and working from this perspective can help when strategizing your approach to the problem’s influence over your living. To this end, and to support a creative approach to whatever may bring you to therapy, a Narrative Therapy practice that has been enthusiastically taken up at New Authorship Narrative Therapy is therapeutic document writing for Narrative Therapy Sessions (please note, I am not offering therapeutic documents for sex therapy sessions).

Therapeutic documents are a creative-something that your therapist will share with you at the beginning of your next therapy session. Therapeutic documents are meant to hold the heart of your previous conversation (either in intake or in session), which creates a starting point for the next therapeutic conversation. Therapeutic documents serve to invite open and honest collaboration, corrections or revisiting of previously held meanings, and creative approaches to what you hope for your life. These documents can take many forms, including poetry, stories, letters, etc., with no form being better, worse, or less than any other.

So, all of this being said, what does it mean you can expect from Narrative Therapy as practiced here at New Authorship Narrative Therapy? It means that my practice begins with the ideas that:

“The person is not the problem, the person’s relationship to the problem is the problem” (Michael White, emphasis Heather’s).
Clients are encouraged to tell their stories in as much detail as possible, because there can be a lot of depth hidden in the details.
Every human being has innate and crafted skills, talents, and ideas that are powerful tools for change.
Stories will be received with a non-judgemental curiosity about your individual experiences, outside the limiting “should’s” we’ve inherited from the world.
I firmly believe it’s impossible to fully appreciate a person’s experience without understanding the larger social and historical context of their stories, because they make a big difference to our life choices and chances.
Clients are encouraged to bring poetry, art, song lyrics, movie/TV quotes or clips, etc. that are either created by the client or have been found significant by the client to help communicate their experiences.

*You can find the Calgary Narrative Collective here if you would like more information on who they are and how they work. I would highly recommend that anyone interested in learning more about Contemporary Feminist Narrative Therapy read the work of Sanni Paljakka, Tom Carlson, and everyone at the Calgary Narrative Collective as it is unparalleled. They occasionally offer workshops for professional development in Narrative Therapy, the information for which can also be found on their website. I remain forever grateful for the time, love, and effort my supervisors, Sanni Paljakka and Tom Carlson, put into my education with the Calgary Narrative Collective because I would not be the person or therapist I am without them.

Having grown up in the confluence of abstinence only sex education, the cultural impact of the “purity movement,” and the early days of the internet, I have witnessed how harmful it’s been to have sex be both ubiquitous and unspeakable. I witnessed the power of knowledge and conversation in breaking shame and stigma before it could begin, because they never should have existed at all. Sex has equal potential for destruction and liberation, including the freedom not to participate in sex at all. All of this, and so much more, brought me to the point of practicing sex therapy.

I trained in sex therapy through the American Association of Sex Educators, Councillors, and Therapists (AASECT) accredited training program out of the University of Guelph, but I have woven topics related to sex and sexuality throughout my education. I am proud to say that I can honestly call myself a sex researcher of sorts, as I had the privilege of conducting a qualitative, or conversation-based, research study during my undergraduate degree talking to women about their experiences of treatment-emergent sexual dysfunction caused by psychotropic medications (Leveque, Samarron, & Shaw, 2020). All of this to say: I’m here to talk about sex with you if that’s something you’d like space to talk about, because I think it’s a deeply important topic.

Before I go any further, in the name of fully informed consent I’m also going to take time to tell you what sex therapy is not before I take a far longer time to tell you what sex therapy is, as practiced at New Authorship Narrative Therapy.

Sex therapy is not a space to disclose your violation of someone else’s bodily autonomy: Sex therapy is not a place to confess and receive absolution for past sexual transgressions. I am mandated to report child abuse, including child sexual abuse; and real and present danger to someone’s life or physical wellbeing, including your own. If you have violated someone’s bodily autonomy, there are unfortunately few and sparce resources outside of the justice system and I would thus recommend seeking legal counsel for advice on how to proceed with an accountability process.
Sex therapy is not lurid: Sex therapy is a professional space, to talk openly about sex and sexuality in a therapeutic context in ways that can be educational, supportive, and, hopefully, emancipatory. It’s really as simple and beautiful as that! I also refuse the idea that sex itself is something lurid, but I’ll save that lecture for another day.
Sex therapy is not a sexual space: No one should be looking for any sort of sexual gratification from sex therapy itself. Sex therapy is meant to help you figure out what sexual gratification means for you, to you, and what you’d like to do with this knowledge.

Sex therapy at New Authorship Narrative Therapy strives to be consent focused, client-centred, and trauma-informed. Functionally, this means I’m here to talk about whatever you’d like to talk about, including what may have been hurtful or less than ideal. This also means that sex therapy can take many different forms, all depending on what you personally hold as therapeutic hopes and goals. Would you want some sex education, because so many folks have been denied comprehensive sex education? Amazing, I love talking sex ed! Curious about attractions, preferences, or lack thereof? Cool, let’s talk about them and what they mean to you! Are you interested in figuring out how you can connect better with yourself and/or your partner(s) sexually? We can absolutely talk about that, too. In all this talking, the therapeutic approach I bring to sex therapy is the same as therapy more generally: Contemporary Feminist Narrative Therapy.

What it means to me to bring Contemporary Feminist Narrative Therapy into my sex therapy practice is that I begin with the assumption that no person is a problem; that every experience, including sexual, takes place within a larger context; and that you, as the author of your life, have the ability to take control from the problem, even if that looks different than you might have expected.

Sex therapy at New Authorship strives to be informed and affirming of many experiences and identities. For example, we are:

2SLGBTQIA+ affirming and informed
Kink affirming and moderately informed (it's a large and diverse topic!)
Polyamory affirming and informed
Fat affirming and informed
(And the list goes on)

Sex Therapy

Sex Therapy & Relationship Therapy for Couples (+)

There’s a common misconception that sex and/or relationship therapy for partnerships is reserved for when there’s an identified “problem.” This is inarguable, because sex and/or relationship therapy can be a wonderful way to address relational problems, but it’s so much more than that. Marriages, intimate partnerships, couples/throuples/(+), polycules… No matter the name or context, every relationship can benefit from intentional space to decide “what do we want from our next chapter?” Or even, “is this where our story together ends?”

New Authorship offers this space, and warmly invites you and your partner(s) to explore your futures alongside a curious, supportive, and non-judgemental therapist. In fact, I (your therapist, Heather Samarron, M.S.W, R.S.W.) have fostered a professional and personal passion for supporting partnerships because they can be fertile ground for attachment, growth, and opportunities for change. As such, the approach to Sex and/or Narrative Therapy for relationships/couples(+) at New Authorship starts with the assumptions that:

Relationships live in the space between people. Functionally, this means that the problem does not live in one person or another but is clouding the space between.
Each person’s bodily autonomy is real, valid, and forms the cornerstone of consent. Consent is necessary and ethical in every single relationship, even in long-term partnerships.
Each person in the relationship is an autonomous human being, worthy of dignity and respect. Therefore, it is impossible for someone’s relationship status to supersede their right to determination over their life choices.
Each person in the relationship has equal authority, and is able to determine if they would like to explore sticking points, renegotiate the relationship or its terms, or decide that they no longer wish to be a part of this relationship as it stands. Conversely, each member has the right of refusal: you can’t compel someone to come to therapy or change!