For anyone in midlife — suffocating from obligation — and wanting to breathe again.
Body-first counselling for midlife, burnout, and late-recognized ADHD. I specialize in Men, but work with anyone who feels called.
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, when your anger leaks, 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. You want to blow it all up, and you're watching yourself do it.
Either way, you're exhausted in a way sleep doesn't touch. The motivation and drive that used to carry you has gone somewhere, and what's left runs on empty 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
Men — Done with the scripts and asking what masculinity 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. Relationally Honest. Irreverently Sacred.
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 a session
We talk, we get quiet, we lean in. — we practice bringing attention to what your body is doing while you speak. Sometimes we laugh. The work is serious; we don’t always have to be.
Sessions can be uncomfortable in a good 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 motivation begins to run on aliveness instead of obligation. Maybe finding work you’re in love with, and accepting with what doesn’t fit. You begin to find your open heart, and it no longer feels like a liability. You grow into a sense that your life is for something — and the energy arrives organically to live it.
This is all in service to fully living your own life, not a better performance of the life you think you should be living.
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 a totally acceptable 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.