Natalia Martinez, MSW, RSW, and the opening of Thistle and Light Counselling
There is a particular kind of joy in this work that nobody warns you about when you start.
You meet someone in a policy course. You argue about the welfare state. Months later you are reading their research proposal at eleven at night and writing what is your unit of analysis here in the margin. Then you are their field liaison, which means you are on a Zoom call with a placement supervisor, and on another with the student, and you are quietly doing the translation work between the two. Then, because the student is curious and will not stop being curious, you end up supervising a directed study on epigenetics, of all things, which was not on anyone’s plan for the year.
And then one day you are standing in a lobby at Dalhousie in a gown, and that person is wearing a cap with a tassel, and her sister is there, and you take a photograph, and something has quietly changed. They are not your student anymore. They are your colleague.
That happened to me this June with Natalia Martinez.
What I know about her, from having taught her
I taught Natalia policy and research. I was her field liaison. We worked together on a directed study in epigenetics, which is not a place most MSW students go, and which tells you something about how she thinks. She wanted to understand how what happens to a body gets carried forward, and how that changes what a helper is actually looking at when a person sits down across from them.
That is the thing I most want to say about her, and it is the thing you cannot get from a directory listing. Natalia does not treat a person as a problem to be reduced. She treats them as someone arriving with a history, a set of relationships, a neighbourhood, a family, a set of pressures, and a body that has been keeping score. That is a social work lens, and it is not the same as a clinical one. It is broader, and in my view it is more honest: a critical-clinical lens.
She also asked good questions during web conferences. I mean this as high praise. A good question changes the room. It slows everyone down and makes the material real for twenty people at once, not just for the person who asked. Natalia did that repeatedly, and courses were better for it. And yes, I looked forward to every second Wednesday, when I run special evening seminars to hear students’ stories from their placements and offer my feedback.
Thistle and Light Counselling
Natalia is now a Registered Social Worker in New Brunswick, and she has opened her own practice: Thistle and Light Counselling, based in Shediac, serving Moncton, Dieppe, and surrounding areas in person, and clients across New Brunswick virtually.
She works with preteens, teens, and adults. Her stated areas of focus are anxiety, trauma, and ADHD, and she draws on cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, narrative therapy, internal family systems, and mindfulness-based work. Underneath the modalities is the part that matters: an approach that meets people with curiosity rather than judgment, and that treats seeking help as a brave act rather than an admission of failure.
Two details deserve their own paragraph, because they are accessibility matters and accessibility is the through-line of everything I do.
First, she offers sessions in English and in Spanish. Every clinician who works in a second language expands the number of people in a province who can actually be served, and they do it without any of us having to build a new system. That is real access, delivered by one person deciding to offer it.
Second, she has worked alongside Indigenous communities in remote settings, and she carries that experience into how she practises. Remote and northern practice teaches things that no urban placement can teach, chiefly that services designed for a city do not simply shrink down to fit a small community, and that relationship comes before intervention every single time.
She offers a free fifteen-minute consultation, works with a long list of extended health insurers, has a sliding scale for those who may be eligible, and is an approved provider for the Canadian Armed Forces.
You can find her practice here: Natalia Martinez on Psychology Today
Why I am writing this at all
I have taught over 7,000 students across five Canadian universities. People sometimes ask what keeps that sustainable, and the answer is not the lectures and it is certainly not the marking. It is this: the graduates.
Teaching is the only profession I know of where the whole point is that your work leaves the building without you. You put in the hours on policy, on research design, on the awkward field conversations, and then the person walks out and does the actual work, often in a town you will never visit (though I did visit Shediac), with people you will never meet. Everything you gave them gets carried somewhere you cannot follow.
I wrote recently about blackberries, and about how the entire strategy of the fruit is to be worth carrying. Teaching is the same bargain. Nothing survives on its own merits. It survives because someone found it worth carrying forward.
Natalia carried it forward. There is now a practice in Shediac, New Brunswick, where somebody anxious, or grieving, or exhausted, or trying to make sense of a hard year, can sit down and be met well. I had a small part in that, years ago, in a course about policy. That is the whole return on the investment, and it is more than enough.
Congratulations, Natalia. It was a joy to be at your convocation, to meet your sister, and to see you step into this. Please share her practice with anyone who might benefit.
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