Scarlet Jaxen holds a Master of Social Work, a Bachelor of Social Work, and has spent over 15 years providing support as a counsellor and facilitator. Her areas of focus include healing from violence, recovering from trauma, navigating mental illness and substance misuse, facilitating change, responding to domination, and pleasure as a sacred act of resistance.

Rooted in a social constructivist lens, Scarlet’s work understands reality as something that is shaped through relationships, systems, and the intelligence of the body itself. Healing, growth, and personal development, while deeply intimate processes— are often co-opted into trends of self-optimization. Her work redirects these processes back to a personal journey rooted within inquiry, experimentation, reflection, and relational integration.

Scarlet’s expertise emerged directly from her therapeutic practice, where her research into instinct, intuition, and insight revealed how the senses function as legitimate systems of knowledge. What began as a way of listening to her clients through her own body became the genesis of the Sensory Intelligence Framework™ — a practice-based model which assigns authority internally, returning power to individuals and inviting a form of leadership grounded in personal sovereignty.

As a researcher, Scarlet studied under Canada Research Chair Dr. Kathleen Sitter through the University of Calgary, where she conducted multisensory arts-based research. Scarlet contributed to the creation of soundscapes and digital stories to explore the lived experiences of adults with disabilities.

Scarlet’s work is also deeply shaped by mentors whose teachings bridge pleasure, ritual, and earth-based healing traditions. Under the guidance of Regena Thomashauer, founder of The School of Womanly Arts, Scarlet explored the role of desire and pleasure as gateways to purpose and power. With Seraphina Capranos, Willow Kelly, Joni Tabbiner, and Ivry Holmes, she studied ancient healing, ritual, and ceremony, weaving earth-based wisdom into both personal practice and professional facilitation.

Scarlet’s therapeutic framework reflects an interdisciplinary integration of clinical scholarship, participatory arts-based research, and embodied healing. Scarlet has studied response-based practice with Catherine Richardson and Allan Wade, whose work examines the linguistic construction of violence, the culturally implicit bias that assigns blame to casualties of domination, the story of resistance that runs parallel to every story of powerlessness, and the vital role of social responses to trauma. She has further integrated Ross Laird’s work on trauma, mental illness, and substance use; Bessel van der Kolk’s research on trauma and the body; Richard Schwartz’s internal family systems model of "parts" work; Gabor Matés' understanding of attachment; and Lana Wells’ scholarship on domestic violence. Scarlet is especially grateful to the influence of Les Jerome, whose teachings introduced her to Indigenous worldviews that continue to shape her understanding of relational reality, and Jenny Mathews-Thusoo, who introduced futures thinking as a creative and responsive method for social transformation.

Beyond her academic and therapeutic practice, Scarlet’s work is informed by her lived experience within systems of violence, including domestic and sexualized violence throughout her early life. This personal history informs both her lifelong inquiry into how domination operates — and disrupting dominant cultural norms, personal inquiry, healing, and pleasure research serve as sacred acts of resistance. For Scarlet, developing sensory intelligence is not simply personal; it is relational, political, and plays an imperative role as a method of social justice.

Today, Scarlet works at every level — individually, relationally, culturally, and systematically— teaching, writing, and facilitating programs to develop sensory intelligence and internal leadership.