By Lenka Pitonakova, PhD, RPC-C

About me

I am a natural-born therapist with strong empathy and the ability to understand the perspective of others. I am deeply curious about the human condition and am fascinated by how the unconscious shapes our every day feeling, thoughts and behaviour.

I am a Candidate member of the Canadian Professional Counsellors Association with designation RPC-C and I am based in Vancouver, BC. I received my Diploma of Applied Psychology and Counselling from the Kelowna College of Professional Counselling in 2023, with elective specialization on career counselling. In 2022, I volunteered as an intake staff member at Oak Counselling Services in Vancouver.

Before becoming a counsellor, I was a software developer and a researcher. I started my career in the engineering industry in 2009 and received a PhD in Simulation of Complex Systems from the University of Southampton, United Kingdom in 2017. I have developed autonomous robot simulations, distributed data processing systems, games and websites. I trained and mentored junior programmers, led development teams and maintained strong relationships with clients. I taught software development at higher education institutions in Europe and in Canada.

Throughout building my engineering career, I gravitated more and more towards seeking genuine human connection and a way of applying my skills and intelligence to helping others. Eventually, I decided to pursue a career of a therapist. I still run my software development business part-time because I simply enjoy creating.

In my free time, I love reading, writing poetry, playing guitar, gaming and being in the nature. I am also an experienced meditator with orientation towards the Zen Buddhist philosophy. In particular, the idea that the world appears to us through a prism of our subjective awareness and that we can train our mind to not only pay attention to its own processes, but also to recognize its own subjectivity resonates with me.

My tech career experience as well as my meditation practice carry over to my counselling approach and enhance me as a therapist. I value balance between the pragmatic and the spiritual. I encourage all my clients to be goal-oriented when it comes to increasing their well-being. At the same time, I appreciate that some goals go beyond the material or even the societal and are related to re-connecting with our innate self and with the world at a deep level.

Through combining my inter-personal and analytical skills, I help each client discover what they want to achieve, develop a plan, measure and evaluate outcomes and iterate this process on their unique journey of personal growth. I am able to support my clients on this journey by drawing upon my first-hand experience with using many of the techniques that I employ as a counsellor.