Something feels stuck
You may not yet know what needs to change. The first work can be understanding what is happening and finding language for it.
About Renato Discenza
A lifetime of experience, brought into one conversation.
I did not leave one career behind to begin an unrelated one. Discern Counselling brings together the different ways I have spent a lifetime learning about systems, decisions, leadership, culture, health, meaning—and people.
Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying)In person in downtown OakvilleSecure online sessions across Ontario
An eclectic path
A career shaped by complex systems—and the people living within them.
My path to psychotherapy began long before I entered clinical training.
I began as an engineer, designing robots and working in automotive manufacturing. I later moved into telecommunications with Bell Canada, Unitel and AT&T Canada, advancing into executive roles that included networks, capital, supply chains and corporate sales.
Subsequent work in public infrastructure and international investment took me into boardrooms, communities and countries around the world. Those experiences taught me that people can share deeply human concerns while expressing them through very different cultures, histories and ways of living.
They also taught me that a system can look sound on paper while the people inside it are struggling. That distinction has stayed with me.
Health and human potential
Healthcare made the need for accessible support impossible to ignore.
I was drawn into healthcare after repeatedly seeing that health and education were central to human potential in countries both rich and poor. At Hamilton Health Sciences, I saw clinicians and researchers turn questions into evidence, insight and care. Later, serving in healthcare leadership during COVID, I witnessed not only the work of protecting physical health, but also the effects of isolation, uncertainty and unequal access to support.
The pandemic did not create every mental-health need. It made many of them harder to overlook—especially among people and communities for whom timely, appropriate care was already difficult to find.
That experience planted an important seed: I wanted to move closer to the individual person and become properly trained to help directly.
From organizational questions to personal ones
Executive coaching helped clarify what I was being called to do next.
Questions about strategy and performance often become questions about identity, values, relationships and meaning.
While coaching executives, I noticed that conversations rarely remained entirely at the enterprise level. Questions about boards, strategy, conflict or performance gradually revealed questions about the person carrying those responsibilities.
What was preventing a decision? What did success now mean? What was being sacrificed? What happened when a professional identity no longer fit—or disappeared altogether?
I wanted to meet those questions with more than accumulated experience or good intentions. I undertook graduate clinical training so I could provide psychotherapy responsibly, within its ethical and professional boundaries.
Why people come to therapy
You do not need a perfect explanation—or a diagnosis—to begin talking.
Psychotherapy can be essential care for significant mental-health concerns. It can also be a place to think honestly when life has become difficult, confusing or constrained.
The usual conversations feel unavailable
Some concerns feel difficult to bring into a marriage, friendship, family or workplace. Therapy offers a confidential relationship with a different purpose.
A choice carries real weight
Freedom can be uncomfortable. Important decisions bring uncertainty, responsibility and the possibility of loss alongside opportunity.
You want to live more deliberately
Therapy can help clarify what matters, notice what pulls you away from it and support action that better reflects the life you want to live.
Why Discern
Discernment is a way of paying attention before choosing a direction.
The name Discern reflects a process: becoming still enough to notice what is present, considering what matters and choosing with greater awareness.
My understanding of discernment has been influenced by philosophy, contemplative practice and the Ignatian tradition. Its religious origins are meaningful to some clients and irrelevant to others. The underlying human work—reflection, attention, values and choice—does not require adherence to any faith.
I am particularly drawn to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy because it does not promise a life without difficult thoughts or feelings. It helps us notice thoughts without allowing them to become the whole definition of who we are, clarify what matters and take committed action in that direction.
Existential therapy also makes room for questions that do not have tidy answers: freedom, responsibility, isolation, mortality, identity and meaning.
Spirituality and religion
What you believe—and whether it belongs in therapy—is yours to decide.
Spirituality or religion can be a source of resilience, community and healing. It can also be connected with shame, exclusion, conflict or injury. Responsible therapy must be able to recognize both possibilities without steering the client toward or away from a belief system.
Formal religion is not required for questions of meaning, purpose or transcendence. Atheist, agnostic, religious, spiritual, searching and non-religious clients are all welcome. These dimensions enter the work only when they matter to you.
Learn more about spirituality, religion and meaning in therapy.
What it may feel like to work together
Not a guru at the top of a mountain. A curious person walking beside you.
I begin from the belief that there has never been another person exactly like the one sitting in front of me.
My role is not to reveal a special answer that only I possess. I bring experience, training and a broad pool of questions—but above all, I bring genuine curiosity about who you are, what you value, what gives you joy, what causes distress and what you may not yet have had room to say.
Sometimes therapy is like walking through a familiar place and, with someone drawing your attention in a new direction, noticing something that has been there all along.
At other times, it is noticing a fork in the path you had passed many times—or were not ready to explore alone. I can accompany you down that path carefully. We may discover something hopeful, something difficult or something that simply needs to be understood. You remain the person who decides where the journey leads.
Professional relationship
Safe, confidential, respectful—and grounded in your agency.
I will ask questions, offer observations and help bring patterns or possibilities into view. I may challenge you thoughtfully, but I will not substitute my values for yours or make your decisions for you.
The work is collaborative. We consider what you want from therapy, what seems to be helping and whether our direction still fits. When another form of care or another professional would serve you better, responsible practice includes recognizing that clearly.
ReadyToTalk.Today
When you are ready, I am ready to talk.
You do not need to prepare the perfect account of what is wrong. A conversation can help the important things begin to rise to the surface. Book a complimentary 20–30 minute consultation to start.
Start with a conversation