A confidential space to talk through the psychological and practical side of sport participation, at whatever level you play. Care provided by Registered Psychologists, Registered Provisional Psychologists, Registered Social Workers, Canadian Certified Counsellors, Mental Health Therapists, and supervised student therapists. All psychologists are registered with the College of Alberta Psychologists (CAP), Registered Social Workers are regulated by the Alberta College of Social Workers (ACSW), and Canadian Certified Counsellors (CCCs) are regulated by the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA). Psychologists practise under the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists. 50-minute sessions, in person at five Edmonton and St. Albert locations or virtually across Alberta. Open Monday to Friday 8 AM to 9 PM, Saturday and Sunday 9 AM to 5 PM.

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You Might Be Wondering Whether Sports Psychology Counselling Is Right for You

You may be questioning whether what you are dealing with really counts as a reason to talk to someone. Nothing is broken. You are not injured. You show up, you train, you compete. From the outside it probably looks like everything is working.

But you might recognize some of this. Lying awake replaying one play, one race, one set, long after everyone else has moved on. Feeling steady in training and then feeling your body go tight and unfamiliar the moment it counts. Dreading a practice you used to look forward to, and not being able to explain why to anyone, including yourself.

There may be a quieter version of it too. Not knowing who you are on the days you are not competing. Carrying an edge home from a loss and taking it out on people who had nothing to do with it. Wondering whether you still want this, and feeling guilty for wondering.

These are common reactions to an activity that asks a great deal of a person. Sport organizes your time, your body, your friendships, and often your sense of yourself. When something in that structure shifts, it makes sense that the rest of your life feels it. That is not a defect in you or a sign that you are not tough enough.

You do not have to decide anything right now. You may wish to read on and see what this kind of counselling actually involves before you form a view about whether it fits.

Who We Help

Sports psychology counselling at Wholesome Psychology may be a fit if you are:

• An athlete at any level, from recreational to competitive, who wants to talk through the mental side of participating.
• Someone dealing with pressure that sits at the intersection of sport, school, work, or family.
• A person going through a change in your sport, such as a shift in role, time away because of injury, a move between teams or levels, or stepping away from competition.
• Someone whose sense of identity or balance has become tangled up with how sport is going.
• A parent or partner gathering information for someone you care about, trying to understand what support might look like before raising it with them.
• Ready to book now, or still deciding, or somewhere in between.

This service may not be the right fit in the following situations:

• You are in crisis or immediate danger. Please use the crisis resources listed below rather than waiting for an appointment.
• You need a psychological assessment or formal report. Assessments are a separate service at this clinic and are not included in counselling sessions. The admin team can point you toward the correct service.
• You need a legal or forensic opinion. Counselling is not an investigative or legal process and does not produce findings for disputes, appeals, or eligibility decisions.
• You need medical clearance or a return-to-play decision. Those decisions belong to your physician and your sport medicine team, not to a counselling therapist.
• You are looking for coaching, physiotherapy, nutrition guidance, or strength programming. Those are different disciplines with different training and regulation.

If You Need Help Right Now

Wholesome Psychology is not an emergency or crisis service. Counselling appointments are scheduled in advance and are not monitored for urgent messages. If you need support today, the following are available:

• 911 if you or someone else is in immediate danger.
• 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline, available by call or text, 24 hours a day, across Canada.
• Alberta Mental Health Help Line: 1-877-303-2642, available 24 hours a day.

Using a crisis line does not close the door on counselling later. The two serve different purposes.

What This Service Is

Sports psychology counselling is a series of confidential conversations with a regulated mental health clinician about the psychological side of your involvement in sport. You bring what is on your mind. The clinician helps you look at it more carefully, and the two of you decide together what is worth working on.

It is worth being clear about what this service is not. It is not a legal service, an investigation, or a crisis intervention. It is not medical care, injury management, nutrition advice, or a route to a return-to-play decision. It does not include psychological assessment or testing, which is a separate service with its own process and its own fees.

The pace belongs to you. There is no requirement to disclose anything before you are ready, and no standard script that every client is moved through. Some people want to work on something specific and practical. Others want space to think out loud about whether they still want to be doing this at all. Both are legitimate uses of the time.

Everything discussed is confidential, within limits set by Alberta law and professional standards. Those limits are explained in plain language during the first session, and a fuller description appears further down this page.

Clinicians at this clinic work within their individual scope of practice. Whether a particular clinician is a good fit for sport-related concerns depends on their training, their current caseload, and what you are looking for. Confirming that fit before you book is reasonable and encouraged.

Signs Sport-Related Pressure May Be Affecting You

People do not usually arrive with a tidy list of concerns. More often it is a collection of patterns that have built up slowly. You may notice some of the following:

• Replaying mistakes long after the event has finished, in detail, without being able to stop.
• Performing well in training and then feeling stiff, rushed, or blank when it matters.
• Sleep that gets worse in the days before competition, or after it.
• A loss of enjoyment in something that used to be the best part of your week.
• Tension with teammates, coaches, or family that keeps repeating in the same shape.
• Feeling flat or unmoored during the off season, after an injury, or after stepping back.
• Physical signs before or during competition, such as a racing heart, nausea, or shallow breathing.
• Being harder on yourself than you would ever be on a teammate in the same position.
• Difficulty separating how you performed from who you are.

Noticing several of these does not mean something is permanently wrong with you, and it does not amount to a diagnosis. These are patterns, not verdicts. Patterns can be looked at, understood, and worked with, which is what structured conversation with a clinician is for.

How Counselling Works Here

• Find your therapist. Use the Match with a Therapist tool, or read individual profiles on the Our Therapists page. If you would rather talk it through with a person, the admin team can help at 780-904-4880. Ask about sport-related experience when you call, since it varies between clinicians.
• Book your first session. The first appointment covers informed consent, how confidentiality works and where its limits are, and what brought you in. You will be asked what you want out of this. You are not expected to have a polished answer.
• Build your plan together. After the first conversation, you and your clinician shape a plan based on your goals, your sport context, your preferences, and what has or has not helped you before. It is a shared document, not something handed to you.
• Ongoing sessions. Sessions run 50 minutes, typically weekly or every second week, adjusted around your training and competition schedule. Frequency is a conversation, not a fixed rule.
• Progress check-ins. Your clinician reviews with you whether the work is going anywhere useful. If it is not, the plan changes. That might mean a different focus, a different frequency, or a different clinician.

There is no set number of sessions and no fixed endpoint written in advance. Your voice matters at every stage of this, including the decision to stop.

Evidence and Approaches

An important disclosure comes first. The evidence pack prepared for this page does not contain usable sport-specific research findings. The research materials supplied were either outside the topic or did not include readable findings that could support claims about effectiveness, outcomes, or timelines for sport-related counselling.

Because of that, the approaches below are described as what happens in sessions, drawn from how this clinic works. They are not presented as evidence-based treatments for sport performance or for any condition, and no research citation is offered for them. This is a deliberate limitation rather than an oversight. Anyone wanting to understand the research base for a specific therapy approach should ask a clinician directly.

Goal and Values Clarification

What it helps with: Working out what you actually want from sport right now, which is often different from what you wanted when you started.

Evidence summary: No entry in the current evidence pack supports an effectiveness claim for this approach in a sport context. What can be stated is procedural: sessions at this clinic begin with a conversation about goals, preferences, and fit, and a plan is then developed collaboratively. Whether this is useful for you depends on your goals and the clinician's scope.

Limitations: Without sport-specific evidence in the pack, no claim can be made about how well this works, for whom, or how quickly. Individual responses vary.

Structured Reflection and Skill Practice

What it helps with: Looking closely at recurring patterns around focus, self-talk, pre-competition routines, and pressure, and trying alternatives between sessions.

Evidence summary: The evidence pack records no usable findings on named techniques for athletes, so no research-backed effectiveness claim is made here. Session content of this kind may include reflection, skill practice, goal clarification, and discussion of routines, depending on the clinician's scope and what you want to work on.

Limitations: This description reflects clinic process, not research outcomes. Nothing here should be read as a statement that these methods improve performance, confidence, or focus.

Support Through Sport Transitions and Identity Questions

What it helps with: Time away because of injury, a change in role or level, retirement from competition, and the question of who you are outside the sport.

Evidence summary: No sport-specific transition research is recorded in the evidence pack for this page, so this is offered as a discussion topic rather than a treatment. These are among the areas people commonly bring to sessions, and they are treated as examples rather than as a checklist or a set of symptoms.

Limitations: No outcome claim is available or implied. Support for transitions is not the same as medical clearance or a return-to-play decision, which sit outside this service.

Communication and Relationships in Sport

What it helps with: Difficult conversations with coaches, teammates, selectors, or family members whose expectations sit heavily on you.

Evidence summary: The evidence pack does not contain findings on communication interventions for athletes, so no effectiveness claim is made. Sessions may include discussion of communication and how you want to handle specific relationships. Any actual contact between your clinician and a coach, team, or school requires your consent and a separate conversation about purpose and boundaries.

Limitations: This is a description of what can be discussed, not a claim that it changes relationships or outcomes. Results vary between people and situations.

What Results to Expect

Honest answer first: no one can tell you in advance what will change or when. No therapy guarantees an outcome, and any service that promises one is overreaching.

Progress in counselling is rarely a straight line. People often describe stretches where things feel clearer followed by weeks where an old pattern returns, particularly around competition, selection, or setbacks. That shape is normal and does not mean the work has failed.

Several things influence how it goes. What you are dealing with and how long it has been building. What else is happening in your life at the same time. How much room your schedule leaves for the work. And, significantly, whether the relationship with your clinician feels workable to you.

Because the evidence pack for this page contains no sport-specific outcome research, this page does not offer a typical timeline, a session count, or an expected rate of improvement. Some people work on something focused over a short period. Others prefer longer-term work. Your clinician will review progress with you regularly rather than leaving you to guess.

Therapeutic fit matters more than most people expect. Changing clinician or changing approach is always an option, and asking for that change is not a failure or an inconvenience.

Confidentiality and Privacy

What you discuss in counselling is confidential. Your clinician does not share it with your coach, your team, your school, your employer, or your family simply because those people are involved in your sport. If contact with anyone else is being considered, it is discussed with you first, and it requires your consent.

Confidentiality here is not just clinic policy. Psychologists at this clinic are regulated by the College of Alberta Psychologists (CAP) and work under the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists. Alberta privacy legislation also applies. The Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) generally governs private practice settings such as this one, and the Health Information Act (HIA) applies where a clinician or clinic acts as a custodian of health information as that legislation defines it.

There are limits, and you should know them before you share anything personal:

• Where there is a risk of serious harm to you or to another person.
• Where there is reason to suspect abuse or neglect of a child. Reporting this is mandatory under Alberta law.
• Where a court orders disclosure of records or testimony.

Your clinician will explain these limits in plain language during the first session and will answer questions about records, note-taking, and how information is stored. You are entitled to ask all of that before you disclose anything you would rather keep private. Asking is a normal part of consent, not a sign of distrust.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to describe everything that has happened in detail?

No. You control what you talk about and when. Some people find it useful to go back over specific events, while others prefer to work on what is happening in the present, such as sleep, focus before competition, or a relationship that keeps going sideways. Both are workable. If a question feels like too much, you can say so, and your clinician will move on.

Is what I share kept private?

Yes, within the legal limits described in the confidentiality section above. Nothing is passed to a coach, team, school, or family member without your consent. The exceptions are risk of serious harm, suspected abuse or neglect of a child, and a court order. Your clinician goes through all of this with you in the first session before you share anything personal.

How many sessions will I need?

There is no fixed answer, and this page will not invent one. Some people come with a focused concern and work on it over a short period. Others prefer ongoing support through a season or a transition. Your clinician reviews progress with you regularly and adjusts the plan, including reducing frequency or finishing, based on what you want.

What if the therapist is not the right fit?

Then you change. Fit is a practical matter, not a judgement about you or the clinician, and it is one of the strongest factors in whether counselling is useful. Tell your clinician or call the admin team at 780-904-4880, and they will help you move to someone else. New clients may access their first session at 50% off to help find the right therapeutic fit.

Can I do this online?

Yes. Virtual sessions are available anywhere in Alberta and are commonly used by people whose training or travel schedule makes in-person appointments difficult. The same confidentiality standards and the same 50-minute format apply. You will need a private space and a reliable connection.

Can my therapist talk to my coach or my team?

Only if you want that and you consent to it, and only after a conversation about what would be shared and why. Being part of your sport environment does not give anyone access to your sessions. Many people choose to keep counselling entirely separate from their team, and that is a normal choice.

Do I have to be a competitive athlete for this to be relevant?

No. This page is written for anyone who wants to think through the psychological side of participating in sport, at whatever level. Whether a specific clinician is the right match depends on your goals, their scope of practice, and their current availability, which is worth confirming before you book.

Is this the same as a psychological assessment?

No. Counselling and psychological assessment are separate services here. Assessment involves formal testing and a written report, follows a different process, and is booked separately at a different fee. If you think an assessment is what you need, the admin team can direct you to the right service.

Meet Your Clinicians

The clinical team includes Registered Psychologists, Registered Provisional Psychologists, Registered Social Workers, Canadian Certified Counsellors, Mental Health Therapists, and master's level practicum students. Each credential carries different training, a different regulatory body, and a different fee.

All psychologists at the clinic are registered with the College of Alberta Psychologists (CAP). Registered Provisional Psychologists are qualified clinicians completing the supervised practice period required for full registration, and they practise under the supervision of a senior registered psychologist. Student therapists are supervised as well.

Clinicians work within their individual scope of practice, and sport-related experience varies across the team. The supplied clinic information does not designate specific clinicians as sport specialists, so it is worth asking about relevant experience before booking rather than assuming it.

You can read individual profiles on the Our Therapists page, use the Match with a Therapist tool, or call the admin team at 780-904-4880 and describe what you are looking for.

Children and Youth in Sport

Young athletes carry a particular version of this. Selection, school, growing bodies, and adult expectations all land at once, often before a young person has the language to describe what is happening.

Wholesome Psychology provides counselling for children, adolescents, and young adults. Clinicians who work with younger clients use approaches suited to the person's age and stage rather than adapting adult sessions downward. Where it is appropriate and consented to, they also work with caregivers, since a young person's environment at home and in their sport matters to how the work goes.

Consent, confidentiality, and how much a caregiver is told are handled carefully with young clients and are explained at the start. Availability and clinician fit for a young person's sport-related concerns should be confirmed with the admin team before booking. You may also want to look at the clinic's child and youth counselling services.

Taking a Next Step

If you would like to explore whether this fits, there are a few ways to start:

• Book a session online through the booking system.
• Match with a therapist using the matching tool.
• Call 780-904-4880 to talk it through with the admin team.
• Email info@wholesomepsychology.ca with a question.
• Read Getting Started with Therapy if you would like to know more about the process first.

New clients may access their first session at 50% off to help find the right therapeutic fit.

Starting the conversation is enough.

References

• Government of Canada. (n.d.). Mental health support and crisis resources. Retrieved September 13, 2026, from https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/mental-health-services/mental-health-get-help.html