Experiencing Disability

Identity, Currently Offered

For students with disabilities to seek support in a safe environment

Experiencing Disability

What is Experiencing Disability?

Experiencing Disability is a support group designed to provide a space for students with disabilities to seek support in a safe environment. It is restricted to CAL registrants.

How does it work?

Issues include but not limited to:

  • The transition to post-secondary education
  • Disability accommodation
  • Self-advocacy
  • Effectively accessing on campus services (including CAL)
  • Disability and identity

How do I register?

This group is restricted to CAL (Centre for Accessible Learning) registrants only. Please contact your CAL advisor for referral. 

For information or questions regarding this program, you can contact Sean Heaslip at sean_heaslip@sfu.ca.

Spring 2023 Schedule

Sessions will be held via Zoom.

  • February 3 - March 24*

Thursdays | 1:30 to 3:30pm

*No group during Reading Break

About the Facilitator

Sean Heaslip

HCS counsellor
sean_heaslip@sfu.ca

Sean is the HCS counsellor liaison with the Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL), and works with CAL registrants, providing individual and group counselling services. Sean works in an experiential and emotion-focused way, and incorporates grounding and regulation techniques to help clients move through painful areas in order to regain their connection to their goals and themselves. Sean is partially blind, and possesses a lived experience of disability in both the broader world, and as a student, as Sean is also a Masters level counsellor, and current PhD candidate in counselling psychology at the University of British Columbia, having completed his pre-doctoral internship at SFU in 2020. Sean’s research areas also focus on disability issues, around seeking psychological services as a person with a disability, and the impact on blind/partially sighted people of receiving unsolicited help from sighted helpers.