ABOUT
Christine Dennstedt, PhD, MA, RCC-ACS
I'm a narrative therapist, writer, educator, supervisor, and clinical psychedelic facilitator based in Whistler, British Columbia.
For more than twenty-five years, I've been accompanying people through some of life's most significant transitions—moments when familiar ways of understanding ourselves no longer fit and something new is asking to emerge.
Throughout my career, I've worked alongside individuals, couples, and families navigating grief, disordered eating, substance use, relationship challenges, recovery, trauma, and profound experiences of change. Again and again, I've been struck by how often struggles that appear deeply personal are shaped by larger cultural stories about worth, success, gender, belonging, relationships, and identity.
These observations have led me to a central question that continues to guide my work:
How do we create enough space to notice the stories shaping our lives and choose how we want to participate in what comes next?
My work is grounded in narrative therapy, contemplative practice, and a deep respect for people's own wisdom and lived experience. Whether in therapy, teaching, writing, or psychedelic-assisted work, I am interested in the relationship between identity, agency, and change.
I completed my Master of Counselling in 2002 and my PhD in 2010. I teach and present internationally and am faculty at the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy. I also work as part of a team offering psychedelic-assisted therapy through Health Canada's Special Access Program.
My writing project, After the Medicine, explores identity transitions, agency, and what comes next. Through essays, reflections, and practices, I examine the possibilities that emerge when we pause, question inherited stories, and reconnect with what matters most.
Whether through therapy, teaching, writing, or conversation, my hope is to create spaces where people can hear themselves more clearly and participate more fully in their own lives.
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Dissertation
The Interplay of Substance Misuse and Disordered Eating Practices in the Lives of Young Women: Implications for Narrative Therapeutic Practice
BY CHRISTINE DENNSTEDT
The majority of studies pertaining to substance misuse and eating disorders are dominated by concurrent disorders research. Within that framework, traditional medical, psychological, biochemical models, and the disease model of addiction prevail. Studies that consult young women about their ideas and knowledge for how to best address these problems in therapy are relatively rare within these fields. Using a narrative approach to therapy, I explore the interplay between these problems, and the ways in which disordered eating practices and substance misuse problems can “feed off of each other,” thereby keeping young women ensnared in their grips. Twelve young women (insiders) who attended a residential substance misuse program were interviewed about their personal experience with substance misuse and disordered eating practices in an attempt to explore and identify ways in which helpers and young women can use these similarities to their advantage. Using case examples from 12 semi-structured interview conversations, I demonstrate the merits of co-research practices, and detail the practical and therapeutic applications of a narrative therapeutic approach when working with young women struggling with these problems.
