Develop a deep connection with yourself and others

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) combines the practices of mindfulness, intentional living, and self-acceptance with taking actions that help you move towards your goals and values. Using a variety of metaphors, exercises and strategies, ACT can help you address immediate challenges, and ‘get unstuck’ from negative thoughts, feelings, avoidance patterns or other difficult situations that have been holding you back. ACT has shown effectiveness in potentially reducing symptoms related to anxiety, depression, OCD, hoarding and other challenges.

An attachment-based approach to therapy with individuals, families and couples allows for a deeper exploration and understanding of how early childhood relationships might be influencing your emotions, behaviours, and connections with yourself and others today. Moving from an insecure, anxious or avoidant attachment to fostering secure attachments within yourself, your family and/or as a couple, can aid healing from the past, and help build capacity for healthier, stronger, and more fulfilling relationships today. Attachment therapy is used in conjunction with other approaches, to help develop a truly individualized approach to therapy that is well-suited to you.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) looks at the relationship between our thoughts, feelings and actions, and how automatic thoughts and beliefs from the past can impact life today. CBT is one of the most researched approaches, showing benefits in addressing symptoms of depression, anxiety, phobias, chronic pain, low self-esteem, substance use, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and hoarding. CBT can include workbooks, homework and experiments that help to strengthen work during and in between appointments.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an effective, evidenced-based treatment that helps create a life worth living for those with intense emotional swings, impulsivity, suicidal behavior and challenges maintaining relationships. DBT combines cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness to build a range of emotion regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness and interpersonal effectiveness skills. In DBT, opposites coexist – you can accept where you are in your life, while working towards change and reaching your goals.

Adoption and permanency competency, is an approach aimed at supporting individuals and families navigating the unique challenges of adoption and foster care. Experiences of adoption, foster care, and spending parts of one’s early life in a group care or orphanage setting, brings with it tremendous emotional, relational, and identity complexities for the children, as well as for the family as a whole. Specialty training in adoption and permanency enables clinicians to provide a safe space for healing, understanding, and growth, for those who have experienced adoption as children, for adoptive parent(s), or foster families. Therapy related to adoption and foster care can help bring increased healing, connection and resilience.

Harm reduction is a compassionate, respectful therapeutic approach that can help reduce the harmful effects of addictions, hoarding, self-harm and other challenges. Harm reduction recognizes that for some, abstaining from harmful behaviours may not be realistic or a goal for the individual. Harm reduction instead focuses on meeting the person where they are at, building trust, understanding, validation and compassion, while reducing risks, increasing health, safety, emotional well-being, and overall stability.

Motivational interviewing is an evidence-based approach to increasing motivation for action related to lifestyle or behaviour changes and is often used in the treatment of addictions and hoarding and clutter. With motivational interviewing, you develop your own personal road map that enables you to take action towards your values and goals today. Coaching in MI strategies can be very helpful for your family and friends so that they can gain the strategies needed to support you maintaining your motivation for change.

Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT), is goal-directed, and future-focused. SFT looks at how to solve problems, without going too deeply into their history. By focusing on solutions and actions to address current urgent situations, and taking immediate steps towards concrete and achievable goals, and short-term solutions, you can keep the momentum up and see progress almost immediately. Your therapist will ask solution-focused questions to identify your strengths, past successes, achievements, and the ways in which you might use these strengths to support your current work and goals.