i.
Representation, real.
Cultural matching is not a checkbox. It is a clinician who has lived enough of your story that the first hour is not spent on a glossary.
On Touch
A note on
origin, intention,
and the work.
№ 01Origin
Touch began with a single observation: the women I cared about were not staying in therapy. Not because therapy did not work, and not because they did not want to heal — but because they could not find a therapist who understood the shape of their life without being walked through it first.
The Tamil daughter trying to explain why she still lives at home at twenty-nine. The Pakistani woman trying to translate the difference between honour and shame to a clinician who has read about both in a textbook. The Black mother who has been pathologised for being “too much” her entire life and is now sitting in a room with someone who has never had to be small.
These women are not unwell. They are exhausted from explaining.
Touch is for them.
“We are not here to be the biggest. We are here to be the one her sister actually goes to.”
№ 02What We Are
Touch is a
practice,
not a platform.
We are not a directory. We are not a marketplace. We are a working practice with a small, hand-vetted cohort of clinicians and a founder who personally reads every intake.
This is on purpose. The technology that powers most therapy apps optimises for matching speed and session volume. We optimise for the moment a woman opens her laptop two years from now and realises she is still going to her therapist — and still glad she found her.
We will grow slowly. We will say no to clients we cannot serve well. We will say no to therapists who are not the right fit for this practice. This is what makes us different. It is also what makes us work.
№ 03Principles
What we hold to.
ii.
Trauma-informed by training.
Every clinician we accept has formal trauma training. Not a self-assessed competency — a verified one.
iii.
Slow is a feature.
We will never grow faster than we can vet. The day we have more clients than we can serve carefully is the day we close the waitlist.
iv.
We do not monetise crisis.
Our resources page, our emergency directory, and any safety material we produce will always be free, ungated, and visible.
v.
Faith without erasure.
For clients for whom faith is part of healing, we match accordingly. For clients for whom it isn't, we match accordingly. Both are correct.
vi.
Data minimalism.
We collect what we need to make a good match and nothing more. We do not sell data. We do not run advertising. We never will.
№ 04The Founder
Portrait — D.R.
Dheeksha Reddy
BSc · BA · MSc · MPH · BSW
Clinician · Founder
Dheeksha is a clinician with a background in public health, social work, and trauma-informed care, with deep practice experience across Indigenous, BIPOC, and newcomer communities in Canada.
She founded Touch after a decade of watching the women she worked with — friends, family, clients — leave therapy before they had been heard. Touch is what she wishes had existed when she was first trying to find someone for her own sister.