The weight of sadness follows you through your daily routine like a shadow you can’t shake. Maybe it’s anxiety that makes your chest tight every morning, or the feeling that you’re just going through the motions while everyone else seems to have life figured out. You’ve tried pushing through, staying busy, telling yourself it will pass—but here you are, still struggling, still wondering if this is just how life is supposed to feel.
At Ontario Therapy, we understand that seeking psychotherapy takes courage. Serving Deerhurst and the broader Muskoka region from our Newmarket clinic, we offer compassionate, evidence-based mental health counselling that meets you exactly where you are. This isn’t about fixing what’s broken—it’s about understanding what you’re experiencing and building the tools to create meaningful change.
Naomi Barnes, MA, RP (Registered Psychotherapist)
Founder & Clinical Director, Ontario Therapy
With over 11 years specializing in mental health counselling, Naomi brings a depth of training that goes far beyond general practice. She holds a Master’s in Counselling Psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University and advanced certifications in Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Trauma-Focused & Somatic Therapy, and Psychoanalytic & Psychodynamic approaches.
This combination of evidence-based modalities allows her to work with the full spectrum of mental health challenges—from anxiety and depression to complex trauma, chronic pain conditions, and personality disorders. She understands that effective psychotherapy requires matching the right approach to each person’s unique needs and circumstances.
Naomi is registered with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO #004481) and provides clinical supervision to qualifying psychotherapists across the province. When you work with Ontario Therapy, you’re accessing someone who has dedicated her career to understanding how lasting change actually happens.
He’s 45 and commutes from his Deerhurst home to Huntsville for work, but the drive along Highway 60 has become a daily reminder of how disconnected he feels from everything that used to matter. Since his divorce two years ago, it’s like someone turned down the volume on his entire emotional life. He goes through the motions—picks up his kids for weekend visits to Hidden Valley Highlands, maintains his property, shows up to work—but feels like he’s watching someone else’s life unfold. Friends invite him to Deerhurst Resort events or weekend gatherings, but the effort of pretending to be engaged feels exhausting. He tells himself this is just how middle age feels, but deep down he knows something fundamental has shifted, and he doesn’t know how to find his way back to caring about things again.
At 38, Jennifer owns a successful cottage rental business in Deerhurst, managing properties along Lake of Bays with what everyone sees as effortless competence. But behind the cheerful emails and perfectly maintained rentals lies a constant battle with anxiety that makes even simple decisions feel overwhelming. She lies awake at 3 AM worrying about guest reviews, seasonal bookings, and a hundred other things that feel monumentally important in the darkness. The beautiful Muskoka setting that draws visitors from across Ontario feels wasted on her—she’s too anxious to enjoy the sunsets over the lake or peaceful morning walks through Arrowhead Provincial Park. Her family doesn’t understand why someone so successful can’t just relax and appreciate what she’s built.
These stories might feel familiar because struggling with mental health doesn’t always look like what people expect. Sometimes it’s high-functioning anxiety or persistent low mood that makes life feel grey around the edges.
We provide comprehensive mental health counselling for adults and teens throughout the Deerhurst area—including Port Sydney, Dwight, Peninsula Lake, and surrounding Muskoka communities—dealing with:
Generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic attacks, specific phobias, and anxiety-related physical symptoms that interfere with daily functioning
Major depression, persistent low mood, seasonal affective disorder, bipolar disorder, and the complex relationship between mood and life circumstances
Difficulty with intimacy, relationship patterns that don't serve you, family-of-origin wounds, and challenges building or maintaining meaningful connections
Career changes, empty nest syndrome, divorce, loss of loved ones, retirement, or any major life shift that leaves you feeling unmoored
Using Pain Reprocessing Therapy to address chronic pain conditions, fibromyalgia, and other conditions where psychological factors play a significant role
Single-incident trauma, complex trauma, childhood experiences affecting adult functioning, and trauma-related symptoms like hypervigilance and emotional numbing
Whether you’re nestled among the lakes of Muskoka or commuting from Huntsville, Gravenhurst, or Bracebridge, our evidence-based approaches are designed to create lasting change, not just temporary relief.
Begin with a thorough 90-minute evaluation to understand your mental health history, current symptoms, and therapeutic goals. We’ll collaborate on a personalized treatment plan using approaches best suited to your specific needs.
Getting Started:
If you’re experiencing thoughts of self-harm or need emergency mental health support:
Your life has value, and help is available right now.
Mental health challenges don’t improve with time alone—they often compound. Untreated anxiety can narrow your world, making you avoid opportunities and experiences that could bring joy and fulfillment. Depression can deepen, affecting your work performance, relationships, and physical health. Relationship patterns continue repeating until you understand what’s driving them.
The beautiful thing about psychotherapy is that small shifts can create ripple effects throughout your entire life. Learning to manage anxiety doesn’t just reduce panic attacks—it opens up possibilities you’ve been avoiding. Processing grief doesn’t just reduce sadness—it allows you to connect more deeply with others who matter to you.
You deserve more than just surviving each day. You deserve to feel engaged with your life again.
There’s a common misconception that if you’re intelligent and self-aware, you should be able to think your way out of mental health challenges. But depression, anxiety, trauma responses, and ingrained emotional patterns operate largely outside conscious control—they involve neurobiological processes that insight alone can’t change.
Effective psychotherapy works because it engages multiple levels simultaneously: cognitive patterns, emotional processing, somatic awareness, and behavioural change. This is why our integrative approach combines different evidence-based modalities rather than relying on a single technique.
How Our Approach Creates Lasting Change:
We start by understanding your unique psychological makeup, including your history, attachment style, coping mechanisms, and the specific ways mental health challenges show up in your life. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach—treatment is tailored to your specific needs, personality, and goals.
We address both symptoms and underlying patterns. While we teach practical skills for managing immediate distress, we also work to understand and change the deeper patterns that keep you stuck. This might involve exploring family-of-origin experiences, attachment wounds, or unconscious beliefs that no longer serve you.
We integrate mind and body approaches. Mental health challenges often involve both psychological and physical symptoms. Our training in somatic approaches and Pain Reprocessing Therapy allows us to address the full spectrum of how emotional distress manifests—not just thoughts and feelings, but also physical tension, chronic pain, and nervous system dysregulation.
We work with your natural capacity for healing. Rather than seeing you as broken or disordered, we approach therapy as a process of removing obstacles to your innate psychological resilience and well-being.
We begin with a comprehensive assessment of your mental health history, current symptoms, relationships, and life circumstances. You’ll start learning immediate coping strategies while we develop a clear understanding of your therapeutic needs and goals.
This phase focuses on building your psychological toolkit: emotion regulation techniques, anxiety management strategies, communication skills, and ways to interrupt unhelpful thought patterns. You’ll notice symptom improvement and increased sense of control.
With stability established, we address underlying issues: processing past experiences that still affect you, understanding relationship patterns, exploring family-of-origin influences, and making deeper personality-level changes.
As symptoms resolve, therapy becomes focused on continued growth: building the life you actually want, improving relationships, pursuing meaningful goals, and maintaining the changes you’ve made through life’s ongoing challenges.
Our Newmarket clinic provides a welcoming, confidential environment designed for healing—comfortable furnishing, natural light, complete privacy, and easy ground-level access.
– From Deerhurst (Peninsula Lake area): 1 hour 45 minutes via Highway 60 and Highway 400
– From Huntsville: 1 hour 30 minutes south via Highway 11 and Highway 400
– From Port Sydney: 1 hour 40 minutes via Highway 141 and Highway 400
– From Dwight: 1 hour 35 minutes via Highway 60 and Highway 400
– From Gravenhurst: 1 hour 15 minutes south via Highway 11
– From Bracebridge: 1 hour 20 minutes south via Highway 11
While it’s a drive from the Muskoka region, many clients find the trip therapeutic in itself—time to process between sessions and prepare for the work ahead. Newmarket offers cafes and Fairy Lake Park for reflection before the drive back to cottage country.
For many Deerhurst and Muskoka clients, virtual sessions eliminate the significant travel time while maintaining therapeutic effectiveness. Online therapy offers unique advantages: no weather-related cancellations during Muskoka winters, ability to attend sessions from the comfort of your cottage or home, and access to specialized care regardless of your location.
Virtual sessions also allow for real-world application of skills—practicing new communication techniques with actual family members nearby, or learning grounding exercises in the spaces where you’ll use them daily. Our secure, encrypted platform offers video, phone, or chat options based on your preferences.
If you’re asking this question, therapy is likely worth exploring. Normal stress is temporary and manageable—it doesn’t significantly interfere with sleep, relationships, or daily functioning for extended periods. If you’ve been struggling for weeks or months, or if problems feel bigger than your current coping skills, professional support can be incredibly helpful.
The terms are often used interchangeably, but psychotherapy typically refers to deeper, longer-term work that addresses underlying patterns rather than just immediate problems. Our approach combines both—practical skill-building for current challenges plus deeper exploration of what’s driving those challenges.
Therapy is a collaborative conversation with someone trained to help you understand and change psychological patterns. You’ll never be judged or told what to do. Instead, we’ll work together to understand what’s happening and develop strategies that fit your life and personality.
This varies significantly based on your goals and circumstances. Some people feel significantly better within a few months, while others benefit from longer-term work. We’ll discuss realistic expectations during your assessment and regularly review your progress.
This is completely normal, especially in early sessions. I’ll ask questions to help us understand what’s happening in your life and what you’d like to change. You don’t need to have everything figured out before starting—that’s what therapy is for.
Mental health is an investment in every area of your life—relationships, work performance, physical health, and overall well-being. We offer sliding scale options and payment plans because financial barriers shouldn’t prevent you from getting support you need.
Some people do experience increased emotional intensity when they start addressing issues they’ve been avoiding. This is often a sign that therapy is working—emotions that have been suppressed are being processed. We work at a pace that feels manageable and teach coping skills to handle difficult feelings.
When overwhelming emotions or anxious thoughts take over, use this four-step technique:
Stop what you’re doing. Literally pause all activity.
Take a breath. One deep breath, focusing on the exhale being longer than the inhale.
Observe what’s happening inside you right now. What emotions? What physical sensations? What thoughts? Just notice without trying to change anything.
Proceed with intention. What do you need right now? What would be most helpful? Then take one small action from that place of awareness.
This interrupts the automatic emotional reactions and creates space for choice. Practice it during calm moments so it’s available when you need it most.
Many therapists practice general counselling, seeing everything from couples work to addiction to severe mental illness. While breadth has value, mental health challenges often require specialized expertise. Naomi’s advanced training in multiple evidence-based modalities—DBT for emotional regulation, somatic approaches for mind-body issues, psychodynamic therapy for deeper pattern work, and Pain Reprocessing Therapy for chronic conditions—provides a level of specialization that’s rare in the Muskoka region.
Our integrative approach means you’re not limited to one therapeutic model. If cognitive techniques aren’t resonating, we can work somatically. If you need practical skills, we can draw from DBT. If deeper exploration is called for, we can work psychodynamically. This flexibility allows treatment to evolve with your changing needs.
Virtual sessions mean Muskoka residents can access specialized mental health care without the significant drive to Toronto or other urban centers. For those who prefer in-person connection, our Newmarket location is more accessible than downtown Toronto while still offering expert-level treatment.
Reach out to us for a dedicated and knowledgeable psychotherapy solution.
– Initial Assessment (75 minutes): $200
– Individual sessions (60 minutes): $180-200
– Extended sessions (90 minutes): $270-300
– Crisis support sessions (30 minutes): $100
Intensive Therapy Program — Weekly sessions with between-session email support and priority booking
– Couples and Relationship Therapy — Working with relationship patterns, communication, and intimacy issues
– Teen and Young Adult Services — Developmentally appropriate therapy for adolescents 16+ dealing with identity, anxiety, depression, and life transitions
Payment Options: Sliding scale available based on financial need. Payment plans for comprehensive programs. Direct billing for extended health benefits where applicable.
Deerhurst Area: Peninsula Lake, Port Sydney, Dwight, Limberlost, Dorset, Baysville
Muskoka Region: Huntsville, Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, Bala, Port Carling, Rosseau, Windermere
Simcoe County: Barrie, Orillia, Midland, Collingwood, Wasaga Beach
York Region: Newmarket (clinic location), Aurora, Richmond Hill, Georgina
Virtual Therapy: Available throughout Ontario for those preferring online mental health counselling
Regional Mental Health Resources:
Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (Barrie) — Emergency psychiatric services
Muskoka-Parry Sound Community Mental Health Services — Local support programs
Canadian Mental Health Association Muskoka — Community resources and advocacy
Imagine waking up without that familiar knot of anxiety in your stomach. Imagine having difficult conversations without losing yourself or attacking the other person. Imagine feeling genuinely content with your life rather than constantly striving or worrying. Imagine relationships based on authentic connection rather than performance and people-pleasing.
These aren’t unrealistic fantasies—they’re the natural result of doing the inner work that psychotherapy makes possible. The clients who commit to this process don’t just feel better temporarily; they fundamentally change how they relate to themselves and others.
You might discover that beneath the anxiety is a sensitivity that becomes a superpower when properly channeled. The depression might lift to reveal creativity and depth that were suppressed. The relationship patterns that felt so frustrating might transform into genuine intimacy and connection.
You already have everything you need inside you. Therapy just helps you access it.
The rolling hills around Schomberg change with every season, moving through cycles of growth, rest, and renewal. Your healing journey will have its own seasons too—times of rapid growth and times of integration, moments of breakthrough and periods of gentle progress. What matters is taking the first step.
Step forward, boldly, towards a future shaped
by balanced sentiment—not unpredictability.
Ontario Therapy – Newmarket Clinic
171 Main Street South
Newmarket, ON L3Y 4Z1
Comprehensive psychotherapy and mental health counselling serving Deerhurst, Huntsville, and communities throughout Muskoka from our accessible Newmarket location.
Monday-Thursday: 8 AM – 8 PM
Friday: 8 AM – 6 PM
Sunday: By appointment
Secure messaging and brief crisis support available for enrolled clients.
