Counselling for Tech & Knowledge Workers

The work is intellectually stimulating and pays well. The cost shows up somewhere else — in the body that won't fall asleep, in the partner who stopped expecting you to be present, in the slow, quiet sense that you are not actually living the life you've been working so hard for.

If you work in tech, finance, consulting, law, or any of the high-cognitive-load knowledge professions concentrated in Vancouver — whether at a global firm, a local scale-up, or your own startup — this page is for you.

Baraka Ontology & Clinical Counselling offers depth-oriented therapy for working professionals at our Ambleside office in West Vancouver and online across British Columbia. We work in English and Farsi.

What we see

Some of the most common presentations from our tech and knowledge-worker clients:

• High-functioning anxiety — the constant low-grade activation that fuels productivity and quietly destroys sleep, presence, and relationship capacity
• Burnout — particularly the version that doesn't look like burnout because you're still hitting your numbers, still shipping, still showing up. (See: Burnout Therapy →.)
• Founder isolation — the specific loneliness of running a company, where you can't fully share with co-founders, with employees, with investors, or often with your partner
• Adult ADHD that has been compensated for so long the costs are starting to show — sleep, relationships, executive function, sense of self. (See: Adult ADHD Counselling →.)
• Imposter syndrome at every level, including (sometimes especially) at the most senior levels
• Identity entanglement — when "what I do" has become "who I am" so completely that any threat to the work feels existential
• Relationship attrition — the slow drift from a partner who has watched you become unavailable, year by year
• Substance use to manage stress, sleep, social anxiety — often with growing concern from the people around you
• Major life-direction questions — the founder who has built something successful and now wonders if it's actually what they wanted; the senior engineer who has the title and the comp and feels increasingly numb; the consultant who has been deferring their own life for ten years
• Iranian-Canadian tech professionals carrying the additional weight of being the family success story, often supporting parents in Iran and managing diaspora-specific layers of identity and expectation

What's underneath

Most of the suffering in this population isn't about the work itself. It's about the inner architecture that drives the work — the perfectionism, the inability to rest, the equation of self-worth with output, the avoidance of inner life through outer accomplishment. We work at this level. The work changes the relationship between you and your work, which then changes everything downstream.

How we work

Our tech and knowledge-worker clients tend to want, and benefit from, therapy that:

• Is intellectually rigorous and respects their cognitive style
• Goes beyond CBT-style symptom management into the deeper architecture
• Doesn't waste their time
• Is practical enough to produce real change in their actual life
• Holds confidentiality with appropriate seriousness, especially for clients in regulated industries or in high-visibility roles

We can do this work in 50-minute weekly sessions or in a more intensive format for clients who prefer it. Many of our tech-sector clients work with us via secure video for scheduling reasons; we are equally available in person at our Ambleside office.

Begin

Book a free 15-minute consultation — phone or video — to ask questions before committing to ongoing work.

• Book your free consult → Or call (236) 455-6306 Email contact@barakaocc.com

1571 Bellevue Avenue, Suite 210, West Vancouver, BC V7V 1A6 — or online anywhere in BC.