Couples and Family Counselling:

Sessions focus on creating a safe and respectful environment for couples and families to come together and really work out differences. Engaging in healthy conflict can bring about insights, understanding, validation, and empowerment. The aim is to have each individual feel confident in moving forward with new tools and strategies that will enhance their relationships and ability to connect authentically with others. 

When I work with couples, they typically arrive feeling disconnected. I help them to build self-awareness, process resentments and past hurts. I support them to change unhealthy relationship patterns and create new ones based on their values and priorities.

The following are different examples of the work I do with couples:

- We work through trust issues, misunderstandings, and establishing healthy boundaries. It is normal for people to feel as though they have lost a piece of their personal identity to hurtful circumstances, roles or responsibilities that they have. We work through these so that each person can live their life with integrity, accountability, authenticity, and reliability. 

- I support people to get comfortable with addressing conflict. Shifting from conflict avoidance to using strategies to actually create and experience meaningful resolutions. Many times there are a variety of layers of past experiences, and we focus on working through the challenges so that they can truly move forward.

- It is often useful to focus on building healthy communication skills, both verbal and non-verbal. We address defense mechanisms, walls that have been built up, and communication styles that lead to yelling, shutting down, and/or blaming. Together we identify the ways that communication could be better, and then I help each person to develop healthy strategies.

*Knowledge, and mutual understanding are very powerful tools that provide the building blocks for healthy and sustainable well-being.*