Ramona (Himayini) Sharma | Scattered Souls Counselling & Coaching

Hi, I’m Ramona. Thanks for stopping by!

I’m a Registered Social Worker, trauma counsellor, ADHD and academic coach, and University of British Columbia-affiliated social science researcher. I’m also a Third Culture Kid (TCK) who grew up in a diplomatic family and lived across 12 countries on all inhabitable continents.

At Scattered Souls Counselling & Coaching, “scattered” speaks to the many ways people are often labelled, misunderstood, or made to feel fragmented, whether through ADHD, trauma, migration, mixed-race identity, Third Culture experiences, or navigating multiple systems, cultures, and expectations at once. As a mixed-race person with ADHD who immigrated to Canada alone at 16, I understand what it feels like to constantly move between worlds, identities, languages, expectations, and versions of yourself. I know what it’s like to feel “too much,” misunderstood, emotionally intense, chronically behind, or like you’ve spent your life trying to translate yourself to other people.

My work is grounded in authenticity, complexity, and helping people better understand themselves beyond deficit-based labels, reconnect with parts of themselves that may have been misunderstood or pushed aside, and build lives that feel more integrated, meaningful, and true to who they are. My hope is that Scattered Souls feels like a place where all the parts of you, even the ones shaped or scattered across different worlds, cultures, identities, and experiences, can finally come together to heal.

WHO I WORK WITH

I provide individual and family counselling, as well as ADHD and educational coaching, in person in Vancouver and virtually from anywhere in the world

I work with kids/youth, adults, and families with ADHD, learning differences (e.g., NVLD, autism, dyslexia), trauma, migration experiences (e.g., refugees, immigrants, international students), and complex cultural identities, including mixed-race, immigrant, diasporic, and Third Culture (TCK/TCA) backgrounds.

I have a decade of experience working with child, youth, and multicultural populations.

WHAT MY CLIENTS ARE LIKE

Many of the kids, youth, adults, and families I work with spent years being labelled “lazy,” “dramatic,” “weird,” “too much,” or “gifted but inconsistent” while their ADHD or other neurodivergence went unrecognized. Existing as humans with ADHD in today’s world can be deeply traumatic, especially when our ADHD itself is called the problem – rather than the constant misunderstanding, ableism, shame, punishment, masking, and pressure to conform to rigid societal expectations around time, productivity, emotion, behavior, and “normal” functioning.

Mental health systems also often miss that trauma can look different when you have ADHD, often involving chronic overwhelm, emotional intensity, rejection sensitivity, dissociation, burnout, inconsistent functioning, nervous system exhaustion, and years of internalizing criticism despite trying so hard behind the scenes. Too often, support begins and ends with “managing symptoms” or medication alone, rather than understanding the whole person, their environment, desires, strengths, identity, relationships, and lived experiences.

Similarly, many mixed-race, immigrant, expatriate, and multicultural ADHD people carry forms of grief, shame, and fragmentation that mainstream mental health conversations rarely understand. This can look like code-switching so often you no longer know what feels “real,” experiencing racism from your own communities, hiding parts of yourself to survive Western norms, or carrying intense pressure to become “successful enough” to justify your family’s sacrifices. Once you finally discovered and understood your ADHD (because maybe it didn’t even occur to anyone when you were migrating), perhaps you still felt like an outsider in mainstream, Western disability conversations that didn’t consider culture or diasporic trauma.

For many ADHD people of color, there can also be a “double whammy” where both their brain and their cultural ways of relating to time, productivity, emotion, family, or community are judged against rigid Western expectations around “normal” functioning. Families I’ve worked with describe themselves as a space where everyone was overwhelmed, emotionally reactive, chronically late, masking, or struggling in different ways, but, despite the love being there, survival, migration, stigma, and both traditional and Western cultural expectations left little room to name and understand what was actually happening.

MY APPROACH

I am trained in EMDR, Lifespan Integration, and Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT), with additional certification in CBT, Narrative Therapy, DBT Skills Training, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFIT/EFFT), play therapy, psychedelic-assisted therapy and integration (ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, cannabis), mindfulness, executive functioning support, the Orton-Gillingham approach, the ADHD Inside Out coaching framework, critical disability frameworks, and two-eyed seeing.

My work is also informed by the ADHD and psychosocial research I conduct through the University of British Columbia, particularly on ADHD temporal (time) experiences and perceptions, and cannabis use among young adults with ADHD.

Topics I can help you, your child, and/or your family with include:
-Single-incident and complex trauma
-Shame, guilt, perfectionism, and chronic self-criticism
-Time perception, dissociation, and life interruptions/transitions
-Identity-related concerns and masking
-Emotional responses and regulation (e.g., anxiety, low mood, anger, impulsivity)
-Executive functioning and motivation
-Academic/workplace difficulties and burnout
-Parenting, family, and relational stress
-Therapeutic, recreational, and problematic cannabis use
-Chronic pain, illness, and injury
-Medication-related injury and trauma
-Dyslexia and reading difficulties

Trauma and chronic misunderstanding do not just affect emotions; they can deeply impact learning, motivation, confidence, time management, school, work, and daily functioning. Therefore, sessions can include both therapy (e.g., trauma processing, emotional regulation, identity work, relationship patterns) and coaching/support (e.g., executive functioning, reading support for dyslexia, study strategies, job search support, routines, and time management skill development).

In our first session, we’ll take a high-level look at all the parts of your (or your child’s/family’s) life and create a roadmap for understanding what’s going on, where to start, and how to build a life that actually works for you.

If any of the above sounds of interest in any way, please feel most welcome to go ahead and book a free 20-min video or phone consultation on my Jane page (link below). At the very least, I can promise you a worthwhile conversation.

HELPFUL LINKS

For more information about me and my practice, please visit:

1. Jane (booking, availability, and session information): https://scatteredsouls.janeapp.com

2. Psychology Today (insurance and extended health information): https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/therapists/ramona-himayini-sharma-vancouver-bc/1739522

3. My website: https://www.scatteredsouls.ca

4. Google Scholar (research): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S6pfghkAAAAJ&hl=en