Community

Janet’s practice and methods are explicitly in support of community psychology. While honouring confidentiality, she is committed to providing others with new opportunities to speak about their experiences. Within the confines of psychology, Janet is passionate about shifting the dialogue surrounding mental health, trauma, and healing.

Mountain Muskox: Peer Support and Mentorship Program.

Business & Life Coaching 

Janet’s coaching for creative solutions will help you make your new project pop or clear a challenge at work. She will support you in moving beyond stuckness by bringing the transformative power of nature and storytelling while linking diverse concepts to form innovative solutions. 

Training and influences: 

CG Jung – Archetypal Psychology, Dr. Martin Shaw – WestCountry School of Myth Performer’s Training,  Von Holtzbrink Publishing, New York: WH Freeman, St. Martin’s Press, Worth Publishing. Disney, World Fellowship Management Training Program 

Trauma-Informed Peer Support

Janet believes that each person’s healing journey is to travel from the isolation of burdensome individual trauma to a community sense of safety, fellowship and caring with peers knowing similar experiences. Critical incidents cannot be carried by an individual alone, it takes a tribe, a community to remind us of our resilience and recovery. 

In development: Mighty Muskoxen Mentorship Program: A trauma informed Peer support training, is the next step in resilience and recovery. This a year-long program is for community leaders -mountain and ski guides, high performing athletes and biologists - who have experienced critical incidents 

Indigenous Connections and Knowledge Transfer

For over thirty years, Janet has shared time with Canada’s First Nations. Inspired by Rediscovery.org, she attended a three day conference with First Nations of Turtle Islands. Heading west from North Dakota, she travelled with the Splats'in First Nations to the site of Battle of the Little Bighorn. That summer, while working with Caravan Farm Theatre, she shared time with Cree elder George McLeod picking sacred medicine, learning sacred teachings, and engaging in sweat lodges. 

More recently, with Cree Metis wisdom holder, Dr. Karlee Fellner of University of Calgary, Janet participated in Poo'miikapii: Niitsitapii Approaches to Wellness. This program is centered in Niitsitapii (Blackfoot) ways of knowing, being, and doing in relation to poo'miikapii (harmony, balance, unity). These courses involve in-depth exploration of Niitsitapii approaches to wellness: aksistoiypaittapiisini (being resourceful in the face of challenges) in Indigenous communities, iskaipima (guiding people onto a better path) in service provision and education, and iihpkim mootspi (passing on the teachings one has received) through community-based program and organizational development.

Janet’s capstone project was with Kainai Wellness Centre, Stand Off, Alberta. She’s gone on to collaborate with the healing team providing trauma informed therapy, transforming intergenerational trauma, and decolonising therapeutic healing. 

The Shame Sessions

Gretchen Woodman and Janet S. McLeod met in 2014 at a four-day myth and storytelling immersion with Dr. Martin Shaw. As Gretchen puts it “That was when Love tapped both of us on our shoulders.” Since then, the two have developed a deep friendship while engaging in weekly “spiritual-emotional hygiene” and professional supervision. These deep listening sessions encompass the unravelling of Canada’s colonial legacy, decolonizing both psychology and social work professions, identifying and processing intergenerational trauma, all while honouring the process of landing in a “felt body sense” of intuition and weathered-wisdom of “what’s right and true”. Together the friends and professional colleagues process and remind each other, “Buddy, you are not alone.” 

For over a decade Gretchen has collaborated with the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and the people of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. Together they are the First Nation in Canada to take control of the Child Welfare System, moving it from Canadian and BC governments to the responsibility of The Wet’suwet’en People. Another historically important milestone is the Wet’suwet’en have agreed to sign a landmark document with the provincial and federal governments that could change the future of Indigenous rights and title negotiations in B.C.