Bio

Lois Sapsford is the founder and Director of Juno House. As a specialist in adolescent girls and young women’s treatment, Lois has developed a reputation as the ‘girl’s specialist in Calgary. With over 30 years experience, Lois specializes in providing therapy to adolescent girls and young women, and their families.

Over her career, Lois has developed a therapeutic model based on 3 lines of important research: outcomes in psychodynamic psychotherapy, attachment theory, and current research in brain development and affective neuroscience. Bringing these three research areas together has resulted in new ways of delivering therapy to adolescent girls and young women.

At Juno House, therapy is provided by applying attachment theory as the primary assessment tool in understanding the girl’s basic capacity for emotional health. Disrupted secure attachment bonds at critical phases of a child’s development are seen as the cause of problematic self- regulation of their emotional states.

Lois works with adolescent girls and young women to help them learn to ‘regulate their emotions.’ This includes working with girls experiencing anxiety-based issues of eating disorders, self harm, and obsessive behaviors. Lois’ playful and highly relational approach to therapy is warmly received by girls looking for this connection and honesty. Lois completed her Master in Social Work at the University of Calgary in 1990, and has specialized in working with adolescent girls, young women and their families since then. Lois uses EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) training as a core treatment modality to help clients move through early developmental patterns. She is also trained and incorporates EFFT into her counseling practice.

Lois developed and taught a Feminist Practice graduate level course at the Clinical Social Work Program, U of C; a Women & Addictions course at Mount Royal College, and has taught several specialized week-long training programs for psychotherapists throughout North America in working with girls and self-harming behavior through the American Association of Suicidology.

Show Notes

“What I learned about about teenage girls, is, that they are the most honest people in the whole world if you're authentic and honest with them”

Lois opens our conversation with why she loves the demographic she works with and has worked with for over 35 years. As I sat there with Lois in her office you could feel the knowledge and the wisdom plus all the textures and feelings that had “flooded” her room. The muck that was waded through consciously, the resiliency gained, the courage and bravery of every single girl who ever showed up to sit with Lois in that space.  Her office is FULL of color, texture and comfort. Not unlike Lois herself.

We discussed Lois’s career history, The evolution of listening to a deep knowing that brought her to courageously create Juno house:

“So there was just a knowing that I wanted to still continue to work with girls, but I needed to work with girls who had families. So that's when I moved into my own private practice. And I didn't know if it would work. I was like, all right, I'm gonna do private practice with teenage girls … but who's gonna pay me for this?” 

Lois, being an expert of the brain, especially girls brains, unpacks how primitive the brain is, and yet also shares her reverence for how complex it is, and the importance in how it is formed:

“So the brain is an anticipatory organ, which is the other thing that I think was key about what we learned, our brain is constantly scanning to take a look at ‘is there anything similar to what I've experienced before? ‘ and if it picks up anything similar, it stops paying attention to what's going on in the here and now, and it goes back to the pattern that we've learned to protect ourselves or to take care of ourselves.”

She defines anxiety:

“The definition that I've come up with is anxiety is the inhibition of unacceptable feelings.”

Lois talks about how parents have innate accessible superpowers and how a developing brain responds so importantly to a parent’s face, eye contact, voice , touch, to movement, and breath.  One of my favorite parts was a good laugh talking about botox muting our faces and how that robs parents of one of our most important super powers, expression.

She defines resilience: 

“Resiliency just means I'm not protecting myself from bad things happening in the world. But when anything happens, I actually have the internal capacity to tolerate it. To tolerate it, to feel it, and to do something about that, and to know that I'll be okay.”

Lois shares her fears with the amount of technology invading our lives and the lives of our children:

“I also think there's a reason that we see so much crisis, which is the increase in the use of technology. There are brain studies out there that are showing us that kids' brains are now starting to light up in the parts of our brain that should light up when we see a human face. They're starting to light up when they see a screen. So we're actually in the process of rewiring brains in our culture, in that we're setting off dopamine hits from the screen rather than another human being” 

She shares where wisdom comes from:

“Our brain isn't meant to be stimulated all the time. So the thing about brain development is our best ideas, our most creative ideas come in the moment of self reflection. It's all quiet. No one has access to us. We're in our inner world lingering in our internal exploration. That's what I call it. That's where our wisdom comes from.”

Lois gifts us with how to grow our trust, and access to the wise woman:

“So learn to linger, learn to linger in that internal exploration. So that means conscious awareness. That means tolerating the feeling that's coming up. And so when you begin to do this, tolerating it, and uncomfortable feelings are going to come up about whatever your partner, your life, your job, your whatever it might be. And it's not running away from that. It's tolerating that and staying with it. And again, what you just said earlier, a feeling felt changes, right, and it does change, but we have to tolerate it first. And remember how I said about the right hemisphere of the brain, it works in a sequential pattern. First, I have to tolerate my feelings, then the self soothing kicks in, then I'm able to go, what should I do about that? Is that where I want to stay? Is that how I want my life to look? Or is there a shift I need to do? Does this feel  like my true self?  truly our true self is our emotional self”

We wrapped up our conversation with one of Lois’s favorite quotes: 

“Courage comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions” - Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi

And then we wrap our conversation with a quick chat about Juno House and The Arnica Foundation. The Arnica Foundation is where I have the privilege of sitting as a director, with the intention of supporting Lois Sapsford to share her life's work, her brilliance and her love and understanding of teenage girls with the world. When these girls are supported, they grow into regulated, strong, empowered, resilient women, who in turn grow into healthy, Mothers, Teachers, CEO’s, Doctors and leaders who help shape the world we live in.
Thank you Lois for knowing how to get into the muck with these girls, and changing the world as you do it. 

Luv
Karley 

Socials & Offerings:

Juno House : https://junohouse.ca/

Charity of choice: Arnica Foundation https://arnicafoundation.ca/