Our counsellors believe that a healthy family is a happy family. Whether you’re facing a major life change as a family, a difficult period of turmoil, discontent, or confusion, our family therapy specialists in St. Albert can help you find a positive way forward.
Family counselling can help with:
- separation and divorce — managing the transition and supporting kids through grief and loss
- co-parenting effectively after separation or divorce
- blended family dynamics and the unique challenges they bring
- sibling rivalry
- relocation
- difficult relationships within immediate or extended family
- the impact of trauma or grief on the family
- behaviour problems
- parenting struggles
- anger management
- navigating secondary infertility
Understanding Family Counselling
Our counsellors believe that a healthy family is a happy family. They draw on their experience and skill to help families identify areas in need of growth and healing, to pave the way to happier, more peaceful, and fulfilling family life.
Family counselling isn’t only for families in crisis. Families come in for major transitions, ongoing tension, supporting a struggling member, navigating blended dynamics, or simply wanting to function better together. Whatever’s bringing you in, the work is about understanding the family system and finding what helps.
For separation and divorce, family counselling can help you:
- manage the transition and develop coping strategies
- support kids experiencing grief and loss (which often presents as anger and behaviour problems)
- learn how to co-parent effectively following separation and divorce
For blended families, family counselling can help you navigate the unique challenges that being a blended family presents. It can help you:
- co-parent effectively
- identify the different rules and roles for parenting and step-parenting
- support kids through the transition
- recognize and meet the emotional needs of each family member
By understanding what’s happening in the family and supporting everyone in it, real change becomes possible — for the people who are struggling most and for everyone around them.
Our Therapeutic Approaches
We draw on a range of evidence-based approaches, grounded in a flexible, collaborative, and client-centred way of working that adapts to what is most helpful for your family. Learn more about our approach to care.
Family Systems
Family systems work understands that families function as systems — what happens to one member affects the whole, and shifts in one part of the system can shift the whole. The work pays attention to dynamics, roles, communication patterns, and the ways family members may be carrying things on behalf of each other.
Attachment-Based Therapy
Attachment-based work focuses on the relational foundation between family members — particularly between parents and children. When a family is struggling, strengthening those connections is often a key part of the work, alongside whatever practical issues need addressing.
Solution-Focused Therapy
Solution-focused work is practical and goal-oriented, especially useful when families are dealing with transition, co-parenting, or specific behaviour challenges. It focuses on what’s already working, what you want more of, and the small steps that move things in the right direction.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy pays attention to the stories the family is carrying — about who you are together, about each family member, about what’s happening. Externalizing problems (rather than locating them in one person) often shifts what feels possible.
Strength-Based & Compassion-Focused Therapy
Compassion-focused work can help when family dynamics involve high conflict, shame, or longstanding hurt. Building a kinder relationship, with self and with each other, is often where real change starts.
Family work isn’t always easy, but it’s often where the biggest changes happen. When you’re ready, we can help.
Meet Some of Our Counsellors Who Work With Families
Lindsey McColl
Niamh Keyes
Christine Crocker
Christine has been providing services to families, couples and individuals since 2007. She believes relationships are central to the health and well-being of individuals, families and communities, and that each person is encouraged to understand their unique situation and reach for attainable goals as they work toward making changes needed for a better life.
Sabrina Roach
Eskay Ilori
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Frequently Asked Questions About Family Counselling
Sometimes the work is with the whole family, sometimes with parts of it (parents alone, parent and a struggling child, two parents who are separated), sometimes alternating between configurations. Your therapist will help you figure out what makes sense for what you’re working on.
Family counselling can still help — sometimes when even one or two members of a family start to engage differently, the whole system shifts. We can talk through your situation and what’s possible given who’s willing.
Individual counselling focuses on the person in the room. Family counselling pays attention to the patterns, dynamics, and relationships within the family system. Both have value; sometimes both at the same time. The intake conversation will help clarify what makes sense.
This is a common reason families come in. The work often focuses on co-parenting between households, the different rules and roles step-parents navigate, supporting kids through the transition, and helping everyone feel like they have a place in the new configuration.
Family counselling can support the transition itself — helping family members cope with grief and loss, navigating co-parenting, helping kids understand what’s happening, and rebuilding a sense of stability in changed circumstances.
Family therapists are trained to hold the whole system — to understand each member’s perspective without aligning with one against another. The work is about helping the family function better, not about determining who’s right.