Julie is a Canadian Certified Addiction Counsellor whose work is rooted in helping individuals return to themselves with greater self-worth, self-esteem, and personal agency. With lived experience in codependency and its effects, Julie understands how easily people can become stuck in cycles of blame, guilt, shame, people-pleasing, anger, resentment, and unhealthy relationship patterns.
Julie’s passion is supporting clients as they rebuild a healthier relationship with themselves. Her work often focuses on helping individuals identify their wants, needs, and feelings, develop assertiveness, set and maintain boundaries, manage anger in healthier ways, and recognize the patterns that keep them stuck in cycles of emotional exhaustion, rescuing, avoidance, or self-abandonment.
Julie brings several years of experience working in residential treatment, where she has provided both group facilitation and individual counselling support. Her work has focused on codependency, relapse prevention, emotional regulation, family and relationship patterns, recovery planning, boundaries, communication, and helping clients develop practical tools for long-term change.
Her counselling approach is person-centred, trauma-informed, strengths-based, relational, and recovery-focused. Julie believes healing is not about shame or judgment, but about helping people gain insight, build practical skills, and reconnect with their own voice, values, and sense of dignity.
Julie is a Canadian Certified Addiction Counsellor through the CACCF and has completed Fundamentals of Addiction through Fanshawe College. She has also completed specialized training in codependency, including a Codependency MasterClass, and is trained as a Sex and Pornography Addiction Recovery Coach. Her additional professional development includes ASIST suicide intervention training, Nonviolent Crisis Intervention, Indigenous cultural awareness and allyship training through SAN’YAS, LGBTQ+ related studies, and education in Executive Office Administration.
As part of Sarah Montes Recovery and Associates, Julie is honoured to support individuals and families impacted by addiction, codependency, and relational struggles. She is committed to helping clients move toward healthier boundaries, emotional honesty, self-respect, recovery, and a more empowered way of living.
