Family Counselling Services in Cranbrook, BC.

Family counselling serves as a valuable resource for families facing various challenges by providing a structured and safe environment for communication and healing. During family therapy sessions, trained therapists facilitate open dialogue, address conflicts, and promote understanding among family members. Through guided discussions and exercises, families can explore dynamics, improve communication patterns, and develop effective problem-solving strategies. Family counselling helps strengthen relationships, rebuild trust, and foster a more supportive and cohesive family unit. By working together in therapy, families can navigate difficulties, enhance connections, create healthier families

Imagine a family as a tree with branches, roots, trunk representing parts of the immediate and extended family. When working with families, all elements are considered. Usually there is a request for family therapy due to one of it's members in crisis, often a child. However, when an analysis of need is done it becomes apparent that more than one member of the family needs help in adjusting, growing and learning new behaviours. Clients contact me for a variety of reasons: to improve communications, solve family problems, support in special situations such as death, divorce, marriage, illness, child or adolescent issues.

My approach is centered on fostering open communication, understanding, and cohesion among family members. Recognizing the unique dynamics within familial relationships, I tailor interventions to address the complexities of diverse family structures. By emphasizing effective communication strategies, conflict resolution, and the cultivation of a supportive family environment, my goal is to strengthen the bonds that connect each family member. Through a collaborative process, clients benefit from developing practical tools to navigate challenges, build resilience, and foster a harmonious family life.

Family dynamics can be a complicated and sensitive balance within a home. This can be made increasingly complicated by divorce, blended families, individual parenting, spiritual values, health issues and much more. Counseling can provide family members a neutral voice and a place to be heard when fighting and arguing is impacting daily functioning and happiness, of one or more family members. We also help develop necessary tools to resolve conflict in a healthy way, bringing peace and harmony back to everyday lives.

Family therapy is the cornerstone of our practice. We understand that the most important relationships in our lives have profound meaning and impact on our lives. We work to understand the individuals, families, and couples we work with to best support, assess the concerns, and offer insights and support. We help families by working to identify patterns of interaction that are not working and offering new ways of responding to each other.

Working within a wholistic Family Systems approach helps clients to understand the relationship interaction effects on the individual family members. Also, helping each member of the family to feel a valuable part of the solution to problems is a key part of the success in family therapy. Family's often need to learn to forgive and let go of old hurts in order to make their family more functional. After all, a healthy family is a great assest to individual success.

Despite the best intentions of ourselves and our family members, we are often tangled in patterns of invalidation, rejection, frustration and blame. It can feel so messy that we operate in a constant state of fear and a crippling sense of unworthiness. In 2008 I started my counselling career as a family therapist. A combination of individual and joint sessions will take place to allow the space for all voices to be respectfully heard, while helping to identify bigger ‘systems’ patterns that keep you stuck in pain and finger-pointing. I will help to smooth out communication, make room for wants and needs and to heal the old wounds holding you back from having a healthier relationship.

Today's family faces challenges that did not exist even a decade ago. Of course, the same thing can be said for children and adolescents. My experience counselling children and adolescents has demonstrated the importance of supporting families in navigating the problems that their children face. I take a wide-angle approach to understanding families in the context of the larger web of systems in which they participate, such as culture, extended family relationships, social and economic factors, issues related to social justice, and their larger community. I seek to promote positive development in children and adolescents while supporting adult caregivers in their own growth and development