Culturally sensitive online psychotherapy for those navigating life between two worlds. Sessions in English and Farsi. Available in Ottawa and across Ontario.
Ontario is home to one of the largest immigrant populations in the world — nearly a third of residents were born outside Canada, settling everywhere from downtown Toronto and the surrounding GTA to Ottawa, Hamilton, the Waterloo Region, London, and smaller communities throughout the province. And yet the experience of being an immigrant here often feels isolating. Community is harder to find than the statistics suggest. The pressure to establish yourself financially in one of Canada's most expensive provinces can crowd out the emotional work of settling in. Many newcomers across Ontario spend years adapting on the outside while quietly struggling on the inside.
Ghazal immigrated to Canada from Iran and has worked with immigrants and refugees from all over the world — the Middle East, South Asia, East Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and beyond. She doesn't just understand the theory — she knows the loneliness of starting over, the grief of distance, and the quiet courage it takes to build a new life.
Therapy that respects your cultural background, family values, and the complexity of navigating two worlds — without pathologizing your experience.
Sessions in English and Farsi (فارسی), or a mix of both. Express yourself in whichever language feels right.
Schema therapy, CBT, and emotion-focused techniques — grounded in research and tailored to your unique story.
Talk about what brought you here, ask questions, and see if it feels right. No pressure.
Together, we'll identify what's weighing on you most and build a path forward using proven therapeutic approaches.
60-minute online sessions from anywhere in Ontario. Consistent, confidential, flexible.
Insurance receipts provided — most extended health plans in Canada cover sessions with a Registered Psychotherapist.
Free 15-minute consultation available. Receipts provided after each session for submission to your extended health insurance plan.
Book a free 15-minute consultation — no commitment, no pressure.
Book a Free ConsultationOr call (647) 699-5142
NoorMinds provides virtual therapy for immigrants to residents throughout Ontario. Select your city to learn more:
Ottawa carries itself with a certain steadiness, a bilingual capital where so much of life revolves around the public service and its quiet, bureaucratic pressures. It is calmer than Toronto, four-season and family-friendly, with an established Middle Eastern community and a growing Iranian and Persian presence. And still, for many newcomers, that very calm can deepen a sense of isolation, a feeling of being settled on paper while remaining unsettled within.
Ghazal Sheikhtaheri, a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the CRPO, immigrated to Canada from Iran. She offers a kind of recognition that is hard to find when you are far from where you began, an understanding of immigration grief and of the identity that lives uneasily between two worlds. She knows what it is to honour family who remain across an ocean while quietly becoming someone they have not met.
Her approach draws on Schema Therapy, which follows the long roots of the patterns we carry, together with attachment- and emotion-focused work that makes space for what is tender and unspoken. For the professional who looks composed and capable in a stable Ottawa career yet feels strangely alone, this is a place to set that composure down and tend to what starting over has cost. The bilingual life of this city asks a great deal of those still learning to feel themselves in new words, and that effort, however quiet, deserves to be acknowledged rather than carried alone.
Ghazal works entirely online, with clients in Ottawa and throughout Ontario, in both English and Farsi, so that the heart of what you need to say can be spoken in its own language.
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