Suzanne Daigle was in an unusual position.
Here she was, a veteran mental health counsellor, now having her own mental state assessed after taking stress leave from work.
Feeling fatigued, ineffective and cynical, Daigle was told she her burnout was so severe that she likely wouldn’t be able to return to her job.
“It was a difficult decision,” recalls the Flin Flon resident, “as I gave up a 25-year career and wasn’t sure where I was going to end up.”
Throughout her 55 years, Daigle has ended up in all kinds of different places. Born in Toronto, she moved several times as a child each time her father, a terminal manager for a trucking company, got promoted.
The oldest of four children, she grew up in a home that took in as many as five foster kids at a time. Her parents adopted two of them, both girls.
The circumstances from which those children came opened Daigle’s eyes to some harsh realities.
“I remember kids coming to our house and they wouldn’t have any decent clothing, and going with my mom to help her get them whole new wardrobes,” she says, her short blonde hair framing blue-green eyes and an expressive face.
“So you become very aware that not everybody has all the same benefits and advantages that you have. I just was really in tune with that.”
A studious, imaginative teenager, Daigle thought of becoming a graphic artist or an art teacher. She ruled out the former and decided the latter would be too difficult to attain in the saturated teacher market of the early 1980s.
“Any [teacher] who was looking for work was having a hard time and they tended to have to go work in Timbuktu,” says Daigle, who was living in Calgary at the time.
She decided to put her well-grounded compassion to good use as a social worker. Step one: get accepted into the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Social Work.
The faculty wanted applicants to demonstrate their experience in helping disadvantaged people. That was no problem for Daigle, who had acted as a social support for a wheelchair-bound woman with severe MS.
Daigle was accepted and in 1985 graduated with her degree. She spent nearly two additional years in Calgary before moving to Vancouver with her then-boyfriend.
In Vancouver, she filled a variety of roles in the provincial child-protection system. Her work sometimes involved accompanying the RCMP to apprehend children from abusive homes.
“It’s a different world, really,” Daigle says. “You become so
desensitized to things like violence that it just kind of doesn’t phase you.
“It’s not a good thing because your normal is so skewed to abnormal. So now I’m much more in tune with what’s normal.”
By the time she was 35, Daigle was single, back in Calgary and ready to become a mother. Growing up, her family had had positive experiences with foster children, so she decided to adopt a daughter named Shandy.
“That was a good decision, but I also realized that I kind of was trying to be everything to her, and my life was just a little bit crazy,” she recalls. “I was a single parent and I had a ridiculously stressful job.”
Daigle would rely on her parents to babysit while she was still at work. Sometimes she would tuck little Shandy in for the night only to dig out more work she had brought home.
“I just kind of decided I was tired of that and wanted something that was just more relaxed,” she says.
In the summer of 1999, Daigle took a trip to Flin Flon with a friend. She knew little about the community but enjoyed the outdoor lifestyle it offered. In contrast to Calgary, Flin Flon was leisurely and serene.
When she got the opportunity to work in Flin Flon the following year, she wasn’t about to thumb her nose at fate.
“I just took a chance,” she says. “I sold my house, packed up my kid and I came here.”
Daigle began work as a mental health counsellor – clinician is the actual term – with the NOR-MAN Regional Health Authority in October 2000.
Her training and experience, not to mention her array of life experiences, helped her forge strong professional bonds with clients.
But Daigle did not feel that her workplace offered her, her colleagues and her clients the necessary supports. That led to her taking stress leave in late 2011, which led to the psychiatrist’s evaluation that she would not be able to return to her job.
She had to reassess. About a year before her stress leave, she had begun seeing a naturopathic doctor in Prince Albert who performed a peculiar massage on her. It was called Bowenwork.
“I had no idea what it was,” Daigle says. “Had a treatment. Thought it was one of the most bizarre experiences ever. But I kept going back.”
Bowenwork relieved Daigle of her carpel tunnel syndrome and helped introduce her to a variety of treatment options that fell outside of mainstream medicine.
Daigle was fascinated by this unexplored universe of alternative health care. So when she learned of a Bowenwork training program in Saskatoon, she eagerly signed up.
By late 2012 she was a certified Bowenwork practitioner. Bowenwork had become her new passion and, with a cozy practice located in the basement of her Parkway Boulevard home, her new career.
“The hardest thing about Bowenwork is explaining it to people,” says Daigle, who demonstrates the technique by making a rolling motion with her hands along an arm muscle. “It’s a way of resetting the body so that it can heal itself.”
Daigle suggests Bowenwork for a range of maladies, including anxiety, backaches, headaches and insomnia. She says it’s even great for colicky babies.
“Babies are often colicky and their system is kind of unsettled, and so just with barely touching the baby it’s just like that stuff kind of clears and they’ll just settle down,” she says.
“So I’ve had babies do big belches or have big poops while they’re here because things are just a moving, right?”
As a Bowenwork practitioner, Daigle spends a lot of time talking to clients and listening to their concerns. It’s like counselling, but in a less formal setting as compared to her previous career.
In 2013, a year after she opened her Bowenwork practice, Daigle found another missing piece of her life when she married her dream man, long-hole driller Randy Daigle. At 53, it marked her first marriage.
“My mom makes me laugh a lot because sometimes there will be older women who just haven’t found that love of their life, and she loves to tell them, ‘Oh, look at Suzanne!’” she says with a laugh. “So I decided in some ways I’m like this default poster [girl].”
In conversation, Daigle comes across as an intuitive, generous person. Not surprisingly, she is a big believer in Gandhi’s famous saying: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
So what kind of change would she like to see?
“That’s a huge question,” she says. “I really think we’d be in a better place if people would just really tune into being kinder and more understanding of other people.”
And in her career as in her life, that’s precisely the sort of change Suzanne Daigle is about.
