Meet Kartik Saini
Meet Kartik Saini
Hi, I'm Kartik,
and I know what it is to sit
where you're sitting.
WHO I AM..
I am a queer therapist, an immigrant, and a person of colour. I came to this work not through distance, but through proximity, through my own experience of sitting in a therapy room, working through trauma, grieving what I had lost, and slowly, carefully learning to reclaim parts of myself I had buried.
That journey shapes everything I bring to this work. When I sit across from you whether in person in Halifax or across a screen, I am not offering you a technique. I am offering you a relationship. One built on genuine presence, deep respect, and the kind of warmth that only comes from having done your own hard work.
I see clients in Kjipuktuk (Lakeside), Nova Scotia, as well as virtually across the province.
MY STORY
Growing up and living between cultures taught me something that no textbook could: that identity is not a fixed destination. It is a living, shifting, sometimes painful process of becoming. As an immigrant, I know the particular grief of dislocation, the way you can feel foreign in two places at once, belonging fully to neither. As a queer person of colour, I know what it is to move through the world in a body that the world has not always welcomed.
These experiences do not make me a better therapist by themselves. But they have made me a more honest one. I do not come to this work with the assumption that my clients' lives look like mine. I come with curiosity, with humility, and with a genuine commitment to understanding your world from the inside.
Outside the therapy room, I recharge through art classes, meditation, and long walks in nature. These practices are not incidental to my work, they are part of it. I believe healing does not only happen in session. It is something we live, moment by moment, in all the small and ordinary places of our days.
MY APPROACH
My work is relational and trauma-informed at its foundation. This means I believe that healing happens in the context of relationship, in being genuinely seen and held by another person who is fully present with you. It also means I understand that trauma is not just a story we tell. It lives in the body, in our nervous systems, in the patterns that take over before we have time to think.
I draw from modalities that have been transformative in my own healing, and that I have seen create profound shifts in the people I work with:
Brainspotting — A deep, body-centered method that locates and processes trauma and emotional pain at the subcortical level, beneath language, beneath conscious thought. Often described by clients as profoundly settling.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) — A compassionate framework that helps you understand the different parts of yourself, the protectors, the wounded ones, the exiles and approach them all with curiosity rather than judgment. IFS is one of the most genuinely humanizing models I have encountered.
Relational Life Therapy (RLT) — For couples work, I use RLT, an honest and deeply relational approach that moves beneath surface conflict to the adaptive patterns, attachment wounds, and bids for connection that shape how we love.
WHO I WORK WITH
I work with:
LGBTQIA+ adults including those navigating queer identity, coming out, gender exploration, minority stress, and the particular complexity of living authentically in an unwelcoming world.
Couples and partners, including monogamous, queer, and ethically non-monogamous (ENM) relationships.
Immigrants and newcomers, navigating cultural grief, dislocation, intergenerational trauma, and the invisible labour of belonging.
Racialized individuals, whose mental health has been shaped by racism, systemic harm, or intergenerational wounds.
Adults in individual therapy working through trauma, anxiety, grief, identity, and life transitions.
AN INVITATION
If you have read this far, something here has spoken to you. Maybe you recognize yourself in these words. Maybe you are simply looking for a therapist who will not require you to make yourself smaller to be understood. Either way, I would love to connect. I offer a free 15-minute consultation, and it is genuinely that: a conversation, not a commitment. A chance to see whether working together feels right. There is no pressure. No obligation. Just an open door.
Whether you are looking for support as an individual or as a couple, it would be an honour to walk alongside you.
CREDENTIALS & PROFESSIONAL TRAINING
Registered Counselling Therapist Candidate (RCT-C) — Nova Scotia College of Counselling Therapists, RCT-C24-057
Canadian Certified Counsellor (CCC) — Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association, CCC 11247951
Masters in Counselling Psychology | Yorkville University 2024
Relational Life Therapy (RLT) Certified Couples Therapist (On going)
IFS Level 1 — Internal Family Systems
Brainspotting with David Grand: Integrating the Neuroexperiential Model for Rapid Trauma Healing
EMDR Basic Training
Gottman Method
Integrative Sex and Couples Certification Training with Tammy Nelson