Tara McKee, Registered Psychotherapist and Sex Educator

11/18/2025

Today, the third Tuesday in November, marks the annual National Grief and Bereavement Day in Canada.

Many people find it awkward to talk about death, loss, or grief. Grief is often misunderstood – by those who are experiencing it and by those trying to help.

Everyone will face loss at some point, but few of us are prepared for how long it can last, how deep it can feel, or how it changes our lives and the lives of the people we love.

When personal connection matters most, many who are grieving feel alone, misunderstood, and unsupported. Even well-meaning friends and family often struggle to provide comfort or guidance in the ways that are most helpful.

On National Grief and Bereavement Day, support grief literacy in Canada.

11/17/2025

10/23/2025

The message here is so important.

* I am not promoting this link/product/seevice. *

10/15/2025

Authentic mental health care would support people in reconnecting with their integrity and aliveness, rather than coercing them to adapt to a culture that violates it.

10/15/2025

How we feel and the emotions we experience are a central part of our mental health. Conversely how we respond to emotions is critical for our health, mental and physical. While they can perplexing, stubborn, frustrating, annoying, frightening and downright depressing at times, emotions are a fundamental and necessary part of brain functioning. In fact, they are central to being human.

Unfortunately societal beliefs often tells us we shouldn’t have emotions or some emotions are bad. Telling your brain it shouldn’t have emotions is like telling your heart not to beat or your lungs not to breathe, and it doesn’t make your brain very happy.

Emotions don’t always feel nice and can make us want to run away from them. And like any avoidance, short term this seems to work, we feel relieved. But inside your brain is feeling pretty annoyed at trying to hold it all in.

How you respond to your emotions is important. Research shows suppressing, berating and shaming emotions doesn’t help us deal with them at all and just creates more stress and make emotions feel even more difficult.

Naming, validating, expressing and recognising emotions seems to help us process them and help us become friends with them, rather than them having power over us. It seems to soothe those emotions and instead of adding a layer of more stress and difficult feelings, helps us deal with the ones we have.

read more about the science of emotions and how we can help our emotions in my books
📕‘A Toolkit for your Emotions’.
📚 A toolkit for modern life
📖 A toolkit for happiness

10/09/2025

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPjZxNhEc_S/?igsh=cDNhb3ZmdWplMjNh

10/08/2025

Mental Health Villains are systemic cultural assumptions about mental health that sabotage our mental health. I've identified 9 mental health villains that I want to teach about: individualism, capitalism, saviorism, neuronormativity, sanism, behaviorism, mind-body dualism, materialism, and scientism.

This isn't a complete list of all of the cultural assumptions that impact mental health - There are so many more villains of mental health that interact with these!

If you want to explore this topic with me, join me in Nov-Dec for a 6 week group called Shifting Blame: The Real Mental Health Villains. I'll be covering definitions, examples, and ways to resist these 9 cultural assumptions that sabotage our mental health.

Just like the list of logical fallacies is something you can use to filter information, this list of 9 mental health villains is something you can use to spot common cultural myths anywhere they pop up.

This is for cycle-breakers, cult survivors, and neurodivergent seekers who came to the system for help but got retraumatized. This is for professionals, educators, and parents, and anyone who wants to create spaces for unblaming and unshaming.

This is a top-down process of psychoeducation that gently invites you into a bottom-up process of transformation in your own space and time outside of the class.

You can expect a mix of information sharing and facilitated inquiry with writing prompts and reflection questions. To avoid re-traumatization, this is not a space to share trauma stories and we will not have time for unstructured discussion.

Details here: https://traumageek.thinkific.com/courses/healing-self-blame

10/03/2025

Regarding co-regulation…

The Deep Awfulness of “Go Regulate Yourself.”

Telling someone to “go regulate yourself” misses the point. 🙄

We regulate best with support, not alone. When someone’s upset or overwhelmed, they first need connection, not a task. 🎎

From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, telling someone to “Go regulate yourself” sends a signal of separation instead of connection. That message can push the nervous system further into distress. ⚠️

When a person is anxious, shut down, panicked, or angry, their system is already struggling to feel safe. In that state, the brain is scanning for cues: “Am I safe? Am I alone? Is help available?” When the response is “go fix it yourself,” the nervous system often hears: "You’re alone. You’re too much. No one’s coming." 👎

That deepens the sense of threat. It can drive the system further into fight, flight, freeze, or collapse, making regulation even harder. The part of the brain that supports calm and connection becomes less available. 🧠

Co-regulation--feeling safe with another person--helps bring the system back into balance. It tells the body: “You’re not alone. You’re safe now. You can soften.” Then, self-regulation becomes possible again. 👩

So “Go regulate yourself” skips what makes regulation work: being seen, felt, and supported in a moment of distress. 😢

10/02/2025