Individual Counselling
Often people come to individual therapy feeling stuck in old familiar patterns that are painful and difficult to change. Therapy is a collaborative, experiential process tailored to meet your needs as an individual. It creates an opportunity to transform hardship into strength, action, and growth. We will work to explore the impacts of your unique life story to understand how current relationship patterns with yourself and others have been shaped. Understanding these patterns can help you make new decisions to create change and develop new ways to experience more freedom, peace, and wholeness in your life.
If you are struggling with anxiety, depression, anger, loss, grief, stress, relationships, self esteem, trauma, life transitions, or any other obstacles in your life, know that deep and lasting change are possible.
Couples Counselling
Couples counselling provides an opportunity to work on strengthening and deepening your relationship, as well as to overcome obstacles and issues to learn and grow from each other’s differences. Therapy focuses on the unique needs and hopes of each individual in the relationship, as well as understanding the dynamics between the couple so as to collaboratively build on strengths and resolve current challenges. Issues are addressed and explored in a safe and supportive environment, empowering each person to share their needs, desires and hopes. Because many of the patterns in couple relationships come from what we learned in the families we grew up in, surfacing these old learned patterns will help to make new decisions and changes about how it can be different now. It is through strengthening the connection, and growing through differences that a healthy, loving relationship can be fostered.
Family Counselling
We are born hard-wired to connect with others. From the moment of our birth we find ways to connect in order to survive. We learn values, rules, and guidelines from our families – some of what we learn helps to raise our self-esteem and some of what we learn lowers our self esteem. Each person in a family system works at meeting their needs for connection and love to protect themselves in the relationship, but it might look different for each person which can create stress and chaos. Family Therapy can be a safe context to explore how each person in the family experiences one another, as well as to surface hopes and wishes for how the would like it to be together. Therapy focuses on strengthening relationship bonds, changing familiar patterns, and repairing old hurts and disappointments.
Family Counselling can help with conflictual issues, parent/child relationships, sibling relationships, divorce and separation, and impacts from illness, addiction, or loss.
Children & Adolescents
Children use play and art to express what is going on for them at an emotional, physical, and spiritual level. Play becomes their language that communicates what is going on for them in their internal world. Jennifer uses the sand tray and art therapy as a means to help children express what is happening for them in their emotions, perceptions, expectations and yearnings, to uncover their internal strengths and resilience at dealing with whatever is going on for them, and to generate new possibilities and options. Because parents are such an integral part of the child’s world and sense of self, counselling includes working with the parents to enrich the relationship between themselves and their child.
Jennifer also works with youth as they navigate the transition between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence is a time of transition and change, which can result in tension and stress in relationships, emotional turbulence, strain between parent and child, and feeling overwhelmed in general. Jennifer has a great deal of experience working with youth who are dealing with anxiety, depression, aggression, suicide, loss, parental separation and divorce, struggles in school, and trauma. Working with adolescents includes work with the parents or caregivers to strengthen their relationship in order to foster lasting change.