For anyone in midlife suffocating with obligation — and wanting to breathe again.
Body-first counselling for midlife, burnout, and late-recognized ADHD. Primarily working with men.
Ben Weidman, MA, RCC · Registered Clinical Counsellor · Virtual across BC.
I also serve - Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut.
For the ones who hold everything together
Everyone else is fine. You made sure of it.
You're the one people come to, the one who notices what's needed before anyone asks, the one who can be counted on. From the outside there's nothing wrong — and that's part of what makes it hard to say out loud. You know how to smile, make eye-contact, make a joke, as the phrase “no problem, I’m easy” rolls off your tongue.
You know how to read a room, manage the mood, be what's needed without anyone asking for it. You know what someone else is feeling before they do.
You've been performing what it means to be okay for so long that you're not even sure where the performance ends.
And when you can’t hold it together, you are called irresponsible or impulsive and it makes you want to scream. Taking care of everyone else feels like a full-time job. Resentment and anger flash when people around you clearly don’t understand this.
You don’t even know what you want anymore, or whether wanting is even allowed.
Or, maybe you’ve gotten to the point where you can’t hold together. It's coming apart loudly — the job, the marriage, the temper, who you thought you were — and you're watching yourself do it.
Either way, you're exhausted in a way sleep doesn't touch. The motivation that used to carry you has gone somewhere, and what's left runs on obligation — a long list of shoulds that you never agreed to. Some nights a question surfaces, and you push it back down:
"Is this it?"
You can't pretend to enjoy ignoring yourself anymore.
That's usually when people find me.
I work with people who are...
Burned out — tired in a way rest doesn’t fix
Late-recognized ADHD — finally understanding why everything felt harder than it looked
Coming apart — the job, the marriage, the temper — loudly, and tired of pretending otherwise
At a midlife threshold — the old life doesn’t fit and the next one hasn’t arrived
Holding it all together — the caretaker, the fixer, the one everyone quietly counts on
Done with the scripts — asking what being a man / woman actually means, on their own terms
Not their first therapist — they've done the work before; it didn't reach the thing underneath
For some, gendered language is a helpful access point - If your experience is outside of the binary and recognize yourself here, that’s what matters.
Body-first. Honest. Sometimes irreverent.
Most of the people I work with have already read the books. Insight isn’t the missing piece. What’s missing is being able to feel what’s actually happening in you — under the coping, under the performance — long enough for something to shift.
So we slow down. We work with the body, and with the parts of you that learned early to please, perform, and stay ahead of everyone’s needs. Not to fix you — there’s an intact core under all of it, and the work is clearing the way back to it.
I trained in clinical counselling and Buddhist psychology at Naropa, and I’ve spent decades sitting quietly with what’s underneath words. I’m not afraid of your anger or your grief. And I know this room from the inside— I didn’t come to this work by accident.
What happens in the room
Mostly, we talk — with more attention to what your body is doing while you speak. Sometimes we laugh. The work is serious; we don’t always have to be.
Some sessions can be uncomfortable in the honest way — the kind of uncomfortable that means something real is finally moving.
Your life doesn’t change first, you do: more room in the chest, less performance, a clearer sense of what’s actually yours.
And then — further in — we discover that the drive comes back, but it’s not the old drive; it runs on aliveness instead of obligation. Work you’re in love with, or the honest reckoning with work you’re not. An open heart that isn’t a liability. The sense that your life is for something — and the energy to live like it.
Not a better performance of your life. Your own actual life, fully lived.
Sessions
Virtual, across British Columbia · 50 minutes · $195 CAD
Coverage
Many extended health plans cover Registered Clinical Counsellors — check yours
Start
Free 20-minute consultation
You don’t need to have it figured out to start.
“Something’s off and I don’t know what” is an honest place to begin.
And so is - “everything’s on fire.”
One conversation is usually enough to feel whether this fits. And if I’m not the right person, I’ll help you find who is.