Tanika Newman, MSW, RSW

Tanika Newman is a Black Registered Social Worker with over 13 years of experience supporting children, youth, adults, and families through some of the most vulnerable and transformative moments of their lives. Her background spans family preservation and support work, individual therapy, and equity-focused practice, giving her a deep, grounded understanding of how systems, culture, and community shape mental health, especially for Black women and families.

As a mother who has navigated pregnancy and parenting herself, Tanika brings both clinical expertise and lived experience into the therapy room. She knows firsthand the weight of showing up for others while trying to hold yourself together, and she creates space for that complexity rather than asking clients to set it aside.

Her practice is trauma-informed and culturally attuned, blending practical, evidence-based tools with real compassion. Tanika doesn't believe in one-size-fits-all therapy, she meets each person where they are, whether they're navigating the transition into motherhood, processing grief or trauma, managing anxiety, or simply trying to figure out who they are beyond everyone else's needs.

Through her independent virtual practice, Tanika works with clients across Ontario, offering a space where Black women and mothers can show up fully, without having to explain, translate, or minimize their experience. Her goal is simple: to help clients feel truly heard, supported, and equipped with the tools to move through life's seasons with more ease and self-trust.

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This season, whether you're trying to conceive, pregnant, or navigating early parenthood, brings emotional and identity shifts I understand both clinically and personally. I support clients through fertility-related grief and anxiety, perinatal mood and anxiety concerns, birth trauma, the identity upheaval of new parenthood, relationship strain after a baby arrives, and the mental load that often goes unnamed in early parenting.

I draw on modalities suited to this population: somatic approaches for birth trauma and nervous-system dysregulation, ACT for identity disruption, Narrative Therapy for making sense of an experience that didn't go as expected, culturally adapted CBT for perinatal anxiety, and Brief Solution-Focused Therapy for practical tools alongside emotional processing.

I work across the full arc: preconception through postpartum and early parenting, with particular attention to what's often left unaddressed for Black women and families: navigating medical systems that haven't always listened, managing family and community expectations, and the pressure to keep caregiving for others while their own needs go unmet.

My practice is virtual and accessible by design, with sliding-scale options available so cost isn't a barrier during an already stretched time.

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