Hi, I’m Meris
I built this work because I lived the hard version of it first, long before I had language for why my brain worked the way it did, or why loving someone sometimes felt like translating between two different cultures.
I’m queer and neurodivergent, and I’ve navigated the particular tangle of poly and neurodivergent relationships in my own life, not in a textbook. Figuring out how to love people well when your brain doesn’t run on the neurotypical handbook took me a long time, and it took an extraordinary amount of outside support to get there: teachers, community, and a lot of humbling work tracing my reactions back to my family of origin, and the patterns I inherited without ever agreeing to them. That work shapes what I can offer my community. I know where the stuck places are because I’ve spent years finding my own way through them.
I’ve also worked in mental health and addictions since 2007, closing in on two decades of sitting with people at their hardest moments, in all kinds of settings, long before any of this became “my practice.” That work runs just as deep as my own healing does, and it’s just as much a part of what I bring into the room.
Somewhere in the middle of my own undoing and rebuilding, I became obsessed with a simple question: How do we actually let ourselves feel things, grief especially, all the way through? I don’t mean gritting through it or explaining it away. I mean genuinely feeling and fully discharging the emotion from our body, with loving outside attention and zero judgment. Along the way, I learned that difficult emotions, if not felt fully, live in the body. They cause us pain, chronic illness, and they keep making themselves known more insistently until we’re able to acknowledge them. Transformative Listening and somatic releasing work are how I found my way to feeling things all the way through, and finding that gave me the most peace I’ve ever had. I’ve centred my life’s work on helping our inner children find their voices, unburdening debilitating patterns, and inviting our ancestral wounds to release the hold they have on our psyche and body.
I work with couples, individuals, and polycules. I’m poly and kink literate, LGBTQIA2S+ affirming, trauma-informed, and neurodivergent-affirming. That includes coaching and life-skills support for ADHD/AuDHD brains, alone or in relationship together.
Most of all, I’ve walked this path myself, and I still do. Going toward the hard things instead of around them is the invitation I offer everyone I work with.
Most approaches keep you in your head. This work goes underneath. If you’ve already done therapy and still keep hitting the same wall, it’s not because you didn’t try hard enough. Most approaches work at the level of behaviour and communication without touching what’s actually driving it — and for neurodivergent brains and relationships in particular, generic tools often don’t hold up under real dysregulation.
Underneath every conflict loop is a nervous system doing its best to protect you. Underneath every shutdown is an early wound that never got witnessed. When we work at that layer, things actually move.
ROOTS | Regulate and Orient — Lower the temperature of the nervous system first. Learn to notice the moment activation starts, interrupt it before it takes over, and return to your body. For couples, we also map your origin story — why you chose each other, and what that still means now.
RELATE | Rebuild Communication Safety — Learn to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding — how to name what you need without attack, listen without armouring, stay in the room when it gets uncomfortable. For individuals, this is the internal version: naming your own needs to yourself without the old self-criticism hijacking it.
REPAIR | Find the Root — Find what’s actually driving the loop — your triggers, your family patterns, the inner-child needs underneath the reaction. Real education in Polyvagal theory, plus neurodivergent-specific tools for sharing emotional states and holding space, for a partner or for yourself.
BRAVE | Deepen Into Intimacy — For those who’ve moved through the crisis and are ready to go further: guided Transformative Listening, shadow work, witnessed play. Connection — with a partner, or with yourself — that’s honest, embodied, and alive.
Trained In
BA Psychology, University of British Columbia · Polyvagal Institute-Informed Training · EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) · IFS (Internal Family Systems) · 20 Years, Transformative Listening Practitioner
As Seen In
The Clearing: A Journey From Grief to Forgiveness
“The Clearing” describes both the process of emotional clearing between two people, and the expansiveness of reaching a clearing in a forest, a place where light shines through into a dark place. The audience is asked to witness and join on a journey from grief to empathy, from rage and betrayal to forgiveness. Meris incorporates elements of street styles, Balinese dance, contact improv, and improvised fusion partner dance, and by breaking the 4th wall of the stage, seeks to invite viewers into the process with her. On a personal level, this work explores the edges of courage, vulnerability, generosity, and self-trust.
Choreography and sound design: Meris Goodfellow and Pomona
Words: Meris Goodfellow
Creative Consultant: Mathew Jacinto-Uhrik
Songs by: House–Charli xcx; Blue–Billie Eilish; Home–Aaron Taylor
Choreography consultant: Alexey Tolstoguzov