Hi! My name is Alicia(uh-lee-see-uh) Bunyan-Sampson, HBSW, RSW. I’m a Toronto-based social worker and trauma-focused psychotherapist.

I've spent over ten years supporting adults navigating complex trauma, relational harm, grief, and the kind of life transitions that quietly rearrange everything. Much of that work has been with people whose distress was framed as a personal failing, when it was actually a completely understandable response to harm, instability, abuse, or years of not being truly seen or understood.

Areas of Expertise:

• Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

• Relational, digital and gender-based violence

• Family and sibling trauma

• Sexual shame

• Eating disorders within relational contexts

• Suicidality and self harm

• Chronic self-doubt and emotional overwhelm

• Grief (including the kinds that aren't socially recognized)

• Race, identity and intergenerational trauma

  • including anti-Black racism, racialized family dynamics, belonging and exclusion and the psychological effects of living within racial hierarchy.

• Trauma-informed polyamory

I work with individuals and with people in a wide range of relationship structures (romantic, queer-platonic, monogamous, and non-monogamous)when all parties are committed to the process and there is no active abuse present.

Polyamorous Black Girl

Alongside my clinical practice, I created Polyamorous Black Girl — a public education platform exploring Blackness, relationships, non-monogamy, digital harm, and the burden of being incredibly funny. This work has sharpened my attention to power, narrative, and the limits of dominant relational frameworks, especially in spaces where lived experience gets dismissed or flattened.

Outside the Office

When I'm not in session, you'll probably find me deep in a Sims 4 build I definitely didn't need to start, rewatching a cartoon or movie I've already seen too many times, working on something with clay, or buried in a good book. I play with my dog and have a deep and unashamed love of cozy gaming, crafts, and reality television.

I'm also drawn to filmmaking and visual storytelling: forms that reveal how identity, performance, and power show up in everyday life. Occasionally, creative or reflective methods find their way into sessions when the timing is right.

This practice is built on the belief that you are not the problem. Let's figure out what actually is and what's possible from there.