Rooted in Resilience

 Linda Bao approaches her counselling career through a lens of social justice and holistic wellness

Fleeing Vietnam for Canada in 1979, Linda Bao’s parents were crammed onto a small boat with 150 others. Her mother was pregnant with Bao’s brother, the family was famished, and pirates — known to rob or worse — were a constant threat. 

They safely reached Canada, but the challenges didn’t end once they settled in Alberta. However, despite their hardships — separation from family members, not knowing English, and raising children — they thrived.

Her parents’ resilience continues to inspire Bao today as a registered social worker with a Master’s in Clinical Social Work and a focus on trauma, burnout and grief. She takes a holistic approach to counselling — helping both body and mind while also acknowledging broader societal impacts on mental health. As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner with training in Hakomi Therapy, she believes in the importance of releasing unprocessed emotions and trauma.

During your education, you decided to shift from psychology to social work. Tell us more about why you wanted to pursue a career in counselling as a social worker.

I was enjoying my courses, but there was a moment when I felt like something was missing. At the time, psychology classes were very clinical. Mental disorders were viewed as diseases stemming from underlying genetic causes or dysfunction in brain chemistry. 

There’s certainly value in this medical model approach, but I found it too reductionistic and pathologizing.

When I was introduced to the social work profession, I found that missing puzzle piece. Back then, I thought being a social worker meant being a case worker at a hospital or an agency. But I learned that I could complete my social work education and then provide counselling services. 

Social work focuses on the principles of human rights and the pursuit of social justice. We learned about social policy, social justice and anti-oppressive social work practice, along with multicultural counselling.

It wasn’t until the first year of my social work degree that I learned about Residential Schools. I was shocked, horrified, and angry that I was just learning about it when it was such a big part of our country’s history, and nobody at the time was talking about it. That really helped me better serve Indigenous clients. So, that was that missing piece, the social justice piece — looking at things from a broader perspective.

Why is social justice important to your work?

Social justice recognizes that a person’s mental health can be greatly impacted by systemic power dynamics and social inequities. Being a person of colour with first-generation immigrant parents, I’ve always known that a person’s health and well-being can be shaped by socio-economic status, social identities, whether that be race, gender, class, sexuality or one’s abilities. These factors lead to an experience of either privilege or discrimination and different access to resources. 

Rather than pathologizing a person’s feelings and experiences, I validate my clients’ distress as a normal reaction to an unjust society. 

I take a strength-based approach and advocate on behalf of my clients. Clients are experts in their own lives. I keep my services accessible by offering sliding fees and even pro bono services. I work at being culturally sensitive. I try to honour the underlying complexity of the person’s experience. It’s so much more complex than, ‘Oh, you’re depressed because you don’t have enough dopamine, and therefore, here’s some meds.’ 

Your website mentions that you take a multi-disciplinary and holistic approach to health and well-being. What led to that approach?

When I was new in my career, we were taught that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) was the gold standard form of therapy. It’s a form of talk therapy that focuses on thoughts and beliefs and how that affects feelings and actions. My practice is still informed by it today. 

But I noticed there was a band-aid effect where my clients weren’t seeing true lasting change. When one of my old supervisors introduced me to Hakomi Therapy, everything changed for me. It’s a body-centred psychotherapy that uses mindfulness to explore and heal unconscious beliefs, attachment wounds, and trauma.

Nowadays, we hear more about storing unprocessed emotions in our bodies. And so I also started exploring Somatic Experiencing. 

Can you talk more about Somatic Experiencing and what it means?

Somatic Experiencing is another body-centred modality, and it really focuses on treating PTSD, anxiety and other trauma-related symptoms. It helps us to complete self-protective motor responses and release old survival energy in the body. 

When we get traumatized, intense energy gets trapped. Peter Levine, the developer of Somatic Experiencing, explains this through the example of animals in the wild. If a zebra sees a lion in the distance, it’s either going to choose fight, flight or freeze. 

It might decide to play dead. Once the lion leaves and the zebra knows it’s safe, it’s going to start shaking. It’s releasing all the survival energy that it needed in that moment to survive. 

With humans, we don’t always know how to release that survival energy, so it gets bound in our bodies, and that creates dysregulation, anxiety, depression. Somatic Experiencing releases that stuck energy. 

The goal is to create a healthier, more flexible nervous system that isn’t stuck in flight.

It’s about tuning into the body’s wisdom. Our bodies are always organized to want to heal. 

Your work focuses on helping others improve their lives by listening to their bodies and acknowledging what they need. What do you need to live well? 

I believe that to live well, it is important to foster all aspects of our health. This means taking care of our bodies through nutrition and exercise, understanding and expressing our emotions, self-regulating through stress, and living an authentic, purposeful life. It also means having supportive, genuine connections, challenging ourselves intellectually, expressing ourselves creatively, practising self-trust and self-compassion, and feeling safe in our environment. I believe wellness is not a final destination, but rather an ongoing journey that makes life purposeful and meaningful. I always remind my clients that we do not have to be perfect in this pursuit. Being kind, gentle, and patient towards ourselves while on this journey is key.