Trauma-Informed Care by Vivian Timmins
Indigenous Wholistic Wellness Practitioner
Feeling Safe, Seen, and Supported on Your Healing Journey
Trauma doesn’t just live in your mind it lives in your body, your spirit, and your relationships. For Indigenous peoples, that trauma often carries the weight of generations, from residential schools to the child welfare system to ongoing systemic harm. Vivian Timmins, MSW offers Trauma-Informed Care grounded in Indigenous wholistic wellness — a gentle, culturally rooted approach that honours your story, your pace, and your right to heal in your own way.
Whether you’re an individual, a family, or a community helper seeking guidance, Vivian’s trauma-informed practice creates a safe space where you don’t have to explain yourself to be understood. You just have to be ready to begin.
What Is Trauma-Informed Care?
Trauma-informed care isn’t a technique — it’s a way of being with people. It means understanding that trauma affects every part of a person’s life: how they think, feel, react, trust, and connect. It means recognizing the signs of trauma without requiring you to relive it. And it means building safety, choice, and trust into every interaction.
In Vivian’s practice, trauma-informed care is woven together with Indigenous ways of knowing. This includes:
The Medicine Wheel — a wholistic framework that honours the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of wellness
The Seven Grandfathers Teachings — love, respect, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility, and truth — as guiding principles for healing and identity
Land-based and ceremonial practices — because culture itself is medicine
This is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s a relationship. And like all real relationships, it begins with listening.
Trauma-Informed Care Is For
You don’t need a formal diagnosis to benefit from trauma-informed care. You just need to feel that something isn’t right — and be willing to explore it. Vivian works with:
- Residential school survivors and intergenerational survivors — people carrying the weight of a history that was never their fault
- Missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, Two-Spirit, and trans women’s families and survivors — those navigating grief, violence, and systemic neglect
- Individuals healing from childhood, relationship, or systemic trauma — anyone whose past is showing up in the present
- Community helpers, social workers, educators, and frontline staff — those who want to deepen their own trauma-informed practice
- Families and communities seeking wholistic wellness — because healing doesn’t happen in isolation
Wherever you are on your journey, you are welcome here.
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Our Team
How Vivian’s Trauma-Informed Approach Works
Vivian’s practice is shaped by her own lived experience, her academic training, and her deep connection to Indigenous teachings. She holds a Bachelor of Social Work and has completed college accreditations in Native Community Care, Counselling and Development, and Social Service Work. She is also an educator and researcher with the Centre for Indigegogy, where she facilitates training on colonial trauma and Indigenous-led responses.
But credentials are only part of the story. What makes Vivian’s approach different is the way she brings together:
🌿 Cultural Roots and Clinical Knowledge
Vivian’s ancestral roots are in the O’Mushkegowuk territory on the western shores of James Bay, Ontario. She is a registered member of Constance Lake First Nation and carries the teachings of the Seven Grandfathers into her work. At the same time, she is trained in clinical social work — so you get the best of both worlds: cultural grounding and evidence-informed practice.
🛡️ Safety First, Always
Vivian’s ancestral roots are in the O’Mushkegowuk territory on the western shores of James Bay, Ontario. She is a registered member of Constance Lake First Nation and carries the teachings of the Seven Grandfathers into her work. At the same time, she is trained in clinical social work — so you get the best of both worlds: cultural grounding and evidence-informed practice.
🔄 Wholistic, Not Fragmented
Mainstream mental health systems often treat the mind separately from the body, and the body separately from the spirit. Indigenous wholistic wellness doesn’t do that. Vivian’s approach sees you as a whole person — and works with all four dimensions of the Medicine Wheel: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
🌱 Strengths-Based and Empowering
You are not broken. You are not a problem to be fixed. You are a person with resilience, wisdom, and the capacity to heal. Vivian’s role is not to heal you it’s to walk alongside you while you heal yourself. As she puts it, trauma-informed care is about “micro healing moments” that build resilience over time.
🗣️ Culturally Safe and Anti-Oppressive
Vivian understands that trauma doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s shaped by colonization, racism, gender-based violence, and systemic inequity. Her practice names those realities without letting them define you. She also emphasizes that research and healing work in Indigenous communities must be Indigenous-led — and she lives that principle every day.
THE PROCESS
Our Approaches
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Mindfulness-Based Approaches
Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT)
Trauma-Based Therapy
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