Ellery Wu, M.Sc., MSSC. R. Psych (AB: 7104, HKCP: CP00367)

Ellery has been a Registered Psychologist since 2012.

Ellery has worked in a variety of settings including hospital inpatient settings, in community clinics, and in university mental health clinics. Ellery has helped clients deal with trauma, acute and chronic illness, depression and anxiety, health psychology, addictions, relationship challenges, workplace stress, and multicultural counselling. She has helped her clients manage or over come a wide range of issues, including grief, life stress, eating concerns, perfectionistic traits, self-esteem, and relationship problems. Ellery is also comfortable with and has assisted many individuals who are working through gender identity issues, and the potential collateral issues of family, friends, community, or work disruptions that can sometimes occur.

Emotional Distress (Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Stress)

Ellery has a strong background in Cognitive Behavior Therapy ( CBT). CBT is extremely helpful in aiding clients in learning to understand and manage their emotions. Emotions are a normal aspect of everyday life.  Ellery is skilled at helping clients regain control of emotions that have spiraled out of control.  She helps clients slow their minds down.  As she helps her client’s minds to calm, they are then able to work through such issues anxiety, depression, grief, low self-esteem, confusion, and general unhappiness.  By helping her clients become more emotionally settled, Ellery can then assist her clients in resolving prior and current experiences of bullying, abuse, burnout, stress, loss, and trauma. Ellery is also able to help clients deal with behaviors such as addiction (substance abuse, internet, gambling, shopping) that often arise as a result of emotional distress.

Depression leaves a person feeling tired, hopeless, helpless and alone. When depression deepens, even small tasks can start to seem insurmountable. Ellery knows how depression can lead to withdrawal from, or loss of friends. It can result in having to take time off work, or job loss. Depression can even cause people to give up on the various activities and hobbies that used to make them feel happy.

Anxiety can have similar outcomes, but more often result in feeling immobilized, overwhelemed, and out of control. Whether it’s anxiety about a few specific things (i.e. driving, giving presentations, writing tests, trying to make friends…) and/ or more generalized worry about natural events, the economy, or what could go wrong) anxiety can cause significant frustration. Ellery brings extensive experience and many different approaches to helping people reduce their depression and/or anxiety symptoms. She has helped her clients deal anxiety around singular evenings, ongoing issues, and clients who are naturally anxious.

Addictions

Ellery can help provide treatment for substance use or abuse, time lost to doom scrolling, wandering the internet, video gaming, gambling, shopping or other addictive type behaviours. Addictive type behaviours described a wide range of habits or actions that repeat over and over, and that cause distress for you, your loved ones, friends or result in workplace challenges. Ellery’s approach to addictive behaviour is to figure out the underlying cause. Ellery’s clinical experience, and research show that by treating the source that drives the addiction, the addictive behaviours often disssapear. The source may be having experienced historical trauma or neglect; chronic or more recent emotional distress due to loneliness, feeling misunderstood, or rejected; the desire to mute or suppress emotional pain; to manage stress; or in the case of gambling, the belief that the problem can be solved with the next win.

Ellery works with the client to understand why the behaviour is causing concern, how the client would like to change their life, and what treatment approaches will work for the client. She then develops a treatment plan with the client. Each step is focused on supporting the client in making small, manageable changes to their life. Ellery’s goal is that the client gets to a place where they feel in control of their emotions, reactions, and behaviours. She knows that this process can be complicated and take time, and that it often does not go in a straight line.

Trauma

Ellery is trained in Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) and CBT. These are the two recommended treatment approaches for trauma. Trauma can be caused by any number of events, big or small. It can be a car accident, a natural disaster, a violent attack, or the loss of a loved one. It can also be caused by more subtle experiences, such as bullying, neglect, or emotional abuse. When people, particularly children, are repeatedly exposed to abuse or neglect over time, then a profound form of trauma may present in later adulthood that is frequently mis-diagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder, Major Depression, or any number of impulse control or behavior labels. No matter what the cause, trauma can have a profound impact on our lives. It can lead to a range of symptoms, including anxiety, depression, memory challenges, mood swings, irritability, difficulty with focus and attention, chronic fatigue, physical pain that may appear and disappear for no obvious physical reason, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and dissociation. While many people naturally recover from trauma exposures over a few days or weeks, for others traumatic events can ‘set in’ over time.

Acute trauma such as a break-in, recent assault, or exposure to a car accident may leave a person shaken. It is natural to either want to talk a lot about the experience to friends and family, or to completely withdraw for a few days. Sometimes people will attempt to deal with acute trauma through diversion or distraction, such as taking on extra projects, working overtime, or focusing on video games, exercise, or some other distracting task. Over time, most people recover and re-engage with life as before. For some though, the avoidance behaviours, the overreaction to stress, the hypervigalence and anxiety can begin to take over. Victims of direct or indirect trauma may also start to find it difficult to trust others. They may no longer feel safe in crowds, or even with smaller groups of people that in the past they knew and felt comfortable to be with. Loosing interest in activities and social occasions that were enjoyable in the past can often happen. Eventually some victims of trauma find themselves isolated between their work and home, or even just at home.

Ellery has specialized in trauma work for over seven years. She brings a considerable amount of experience and a diverse range of skill sets in helping her clients overcome trauma symptoms. Ellery is trained in Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), Somatic Experiencing, Narrative Exposure Therapy, and Structural Dissociation. Structural Dissociation work is focused on helping individuals who deal with disconnection from self, dissociative tendencies, lost time, and Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Her familiarity with multiple trauma treatment approaches gives her far more options in working with treatment resistant clients, and clients who have been unsuccessful with other treatment modalities.

Couples CounsellinG

Ellery has completed training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) which is the gold standard for working with couples. Ellery understands how little things can build up in a couples relationship, resulting in increasing communication breakdowns, feelings of loneliness and abandonment, anger and frustration, and loss of the dream of having a loving and supportive partner. Ellery has worked with couples at various stages of their relationship. She has worked with with pre-marital couples who are seeking to start their married life off on the strongest footing. She also works with couples that are feeling early stress in communication challenges and/or behaviours that they are finding concerning in their partner. Ellery is also trained in working with couples who have longer term, more entrenched patterns of negative interactions, chronic misunderstandings and increasing levels of distress. When working with couples Ellery works hard to hear each person’s position, to help the couple identify negative interaction patterns, and then to help the couple change those patterns. Many of the couples Ellery works with find that once the negative interaction cycle shifts they start to feel better about themself, and about the relationship.

Many couples simply find that over time the deep connection they felt with their partner has faded. They are unsure if the relationship is what they want any more. At the same time the couple may feel pressure to stay together “for the children” or “because thats what you do”. Ellery is able to help each person in the relationship figure out what they looking for, what they need out of the relationship. She is then able to support the couple in figuring out if that is something that can happen, or if it something that will not work out. Whether therapy at that point moves towards rebuilding the relationship into a positive and joyful one, or to find a way to end a relationship in the most positive way possible Ellery will walk with the couple to their goals.

WORKPLACE ISSUES, BURNOUT, & STRESS

High achievers frequently get stuck in unhealthy patterns, leading to burnout or other mental health issues. Yet there is an abundance of research showing prolonged or chronic stress can negatively affect the quality of our work, relationships, and lives. Ellery combines her professional background, psychological education and training, and prior experience to help individuals struggling with occupational stress (work and school), organizational difficulties, time-management challenges, emotional exhaustion, harassment, workplace/school conflict, and traumatic work exposures and experiences that overwhelm coping skills.  She is well qualified to help individuals dealing with disability claims, WCB, return to work concerns and career planning.  

Multicultural Counselling

Ellery can provide services in English, Cantonese and Mandarin

Ellery’s work at the University of Hong Kong provided her with many opportunities to work with foreign nationals from around the world. This has given her an understanding of the challenges faced by students, immigrant families, and first and second generation adults who are trying to balance out their cultural heritage and the social and cultural norms of their current home. Ellery has worked with clients from China, India, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Russia, the United States, the UK, and Australia. Challenges faced by these groups often include self-identity, grief-loss, emotional or relational breakdown with immediate and extended family, culture shock, stress, and general confusion and self questioning. Ellery believes that everyone's experiences are unique and are shaped by their cultural background and upbringing experience. She takes a systematic approach when working with clients dealing with these issues. Her goal is to understand where the client is “coming from” and to assist the client in figuring out where they want to be in their sense of self, relationship to family, and relationship to both their new country and heritage. As she learns more about each client she works with them to tailor her approach to what is a best fit for them.

Professional background

Ellery is Registered Psychologist with the College of Alberta Psychologists. Ellery holds a Master of Social Science in Clinical Psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Master of Science in Public Health (Health Promotion) from the University of London, England. Ellery is a Somatic Experiencing practitioner. She has significant experience in Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing (EMDR). She is also trained in Narrative Exposure Therapy, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), and Structural Dissociation.  Ellery has worked as a registered psychologist in Hong Kong since 2012 and in Canada since 2023.

Ellery is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. She is happy to provide therapy in any of these languages.

Availability

Ellery offers daytime and weekend appointments either by video therapy or out of our Sherwood Park Office.