Suite 300 - 22420 Dewdney Trunk Road, Maple Ridge, BC, V2X 3J5
Call or Text 604-220-6572 Fax (604) 792-9388
Call or Text 604-220-6572 Fax (604) 792-9388
Maple Ridge Counselling is staffed with Registered Clinical Counsellors (RCC's) and Registered Social Workers (RSW's). We are all Master's level Counsellors/Social Workers and share similar training and educational backgrounds.
Our Approach to Counselling
During the first few sessions the primary purpose is to conduct a thorough assessment of what is going on for you. This includes finding out what brought you to counselling, your level of distress, your current supports & coping skills (or perhaps lack of them), and your goals of counselling. Through the process of assessment we will develop what I like to call our "working hypothesis". This is our understanding of the problem and it serves to inform and guide our work together. Once we have a working hypothesis we can begin to develop a treatment plan. The treatment plan will outline exactly what we are going to be doing to help you attain your goal(s). The next step is to implement the treatment plan. You can think of this as the action stage because this is where we begin to learn apply new skills and coping strategies and actually test out our working hypotheses to see if our treatment plan is effective.
Remember that counselling is a dynamic and bi-directional process; that is, we are always assessing, hypothesizing, revisiting our treatment plan and monitoring the effectiveness of counselling. Change is not always linear; in fact, many times it is a multiple-step process sometimes it even involves taking two steps forward and one step back! This is how change happens. Change is a process.
Ultimately the goal of counselling is to decrease your level of distress and to increase your level of understanding, personal awareness, and to improve your coping skills. It is our job, and our commitment to you as your therapist, to facilitate this process.
Click the button below to schedule your first session.
We love working with couples who are motivated and committed to repairing, and in many cases, saving their relationships. In my experience, most couples who enter couples counselling do so because they are at a place in the relationship where they are:
•Contemplating separating (or getting back together)
•Trying to overcome a betrayal (infidelity, jealousy, breach of trust)
•Not communicating effectively
•Experiencing resentment, anger, criticism, blaming, and general relationship dissatisfaction
•Lacking intimacy, feeling unwanted, or emotionally unavailable
•Feeling overwhelmed by stress and family responsibilities (health problems, finances, kids, in-laws, blended-families)
Our Approach to Couples Counselling
We believe that any relationship can be repaired and saved provided that both people are willing to make the effort to change. We also know that the grass is not always greener on the other side; it’s only going to be green where you water it. Also, no one person is to blame. Couples counselling is as much about the individual and identifying your individual needs as it is about the relationship.
We work from an eclectic approach, meaning that we use a variety of therapeutic interventions (The Gottman Method, Emotion-Focused Therapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy) dependent upon what arises during our session. I like to use what I’ve termed “bucket therapy” as a way for couples to understand and communicate their needs to each other. Each person has a metaphorical relationship bucket and the more full the bucket, the more content in the relationship they are. Part of counselling is getting to know what fills your bucket. In other words, what do you need to feel happy, secure, loved, wanted, etc., within your relationship? Do you know? Do you know what your partner needs? Is it intimacy, affection, time together, sex, holding hands? So you know your love language? Using this metaphor couples begin to understand their own needs, as well as their partners’ needs and learn how to fill one another’s buckets. How full is your bucket right now? I suspect that it’s close to empty, which is what brought you here, but we can help.
Making the decision to see a couples’ counsellor can be hard for some people and there are situations where one person is not ready (or willing) to go to counselling. While it is ideal to have both partner’s in counselling together, it is not a necessary starting point. In fact, there are times where it can be beneficial to see people individually. Whether with, or without your partner, we can help.
Click the button below to schedule your first session.
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