Psychological Services in Calgary
Marcella uses an attachment framework and model
to understand and treat client difficulties and challenges.
- For children, youth, and families, she is able to offer play-based and creative interventions.
- For adult psychology, she is focused on trauma reprocessing through Internal Family Systems (IFS) Treatment or Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) Treatment.
- For couples or family counselling, the treatment is centred on Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) to help understand relational patterns and cycles.
- Our adult and couples counselling is centred on healthy, secure attachments.
Psychological Services in Calgary
for Children, Youth, and Families
Our Connected, Creative, & Playful Approach with Children & Youth
At Nurture Psychology, we are passionate about connecting with your child on their level and being able to enter their world through play-based techniques, sand tray therapy, therapeutic storytelling, expressive art, and other creative interventions.
Our intention in our creative and playful approach is to recognize and honour the developmental level of your child or adolescent so that they feel respected and valued. When working with children, individually or as a family, Nurture Psychology recognizes that children do not communicate in the same way that adults do. Traditional adult talk therapy can be very threatening for children and it is not effective, because it does not acknowledge their cognitive or developmental abilities.
Our creative and playful approach is free from evaluation and judgment, making it safe for your child to make mistakes without failure, encourages the use of their imagination, and increases their involvement and interest in the therapeutic process in a way that promotes their curiosity and growth.
While creativity is an essential component of our work, we are also mindful that it may not be for every child or youth. We recognize our clients are unique individuals. For this reason, we are committed to tailoring strategies and treatments to meet the unique needs of each and every client.
Child & Youth Psychology Sessions Can Help To:
- Keep your parental expectations developmentally appropriate
- Build pretend play skills and abilities
- Encourage emotional expression, identification, and management skills
- Build self awareness, confidence, and mastery
- Improve social skills, perspective-taking, and empathy
- Understand the factors that influence your child’s behaviour or the underlying needs driving it
- Promote cooperation and collaboration (with other children, parents, teachers, etc)
- Settle separation anxiety or your child’s ability to adapt to new situations
EMDR Treatment with Your Child, Youth or Family
If you and your children have lived through traumas, present day or past, not only are you trying to give your child a secure attachment with you, you are also trying to help them heal from truly distressing and overwhelming life experiences. Children with trauma including physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, may struggle with feelings of a lack of safety or trust in others, making it difficult for them to be guided in everyday tasks or interactions. Under their big emotions and behavioural outbursts may lie deep attachment fears of being unlovable, abandoned, rejected, or even controlled. These big emotions and reactions not only place added stress on you as a parent, but also contribute to great concerns about your child’s wellbeing and welfare.
Any child or parent of a child with trauma is navigating way more than they should. At Nurture Psychology, we can help your child and family reprocess traumas, PTSD, or other difficult life adversities with Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) Treatment. EMDR has been found to be highly effective with children and youth struggling from trauma, PTSD, sexual abuse, grief/loss, sleep disturbances, and other anxious or depressive symptoms or conditions. It has also been found to be highly effective in resourcing coping skills or calm states of mind in highly activated or dysregulated children and youth, so that fight, flight, or freeze responses are settled.
EMDR may be conducted with your child, either on their own depending on their age, ability, and experience in treatment, or with your participation for their increased comfort and sense of safety. It can also be conducted within a family or group session so that each individual’s trauma episode may be cleared out simultaneously. EMDR with your child may also involve integrating santray therapy or other play-based techniques (like magic wands!), in order to make the treatment more appealing and accessible to them.
EMDR Treatment may be helpful for your child if they have experienced any of the following:
- Sexual abuse
- Physical abuse
- Emotional abuse
- PTSD
- Experiences of abandonment or neglect
- Witnessed domestic violence and abuse
- Been involved in a car accident
- Experienced bullying
Engaging Meaningfully with You & Your Child:
Family Counselling & Parenting Sessions
Without engaging with you and your child in a meaningful way, Nurture Psychology believes there can be no family counselling. Our playful, connected, and compassionate approach to family counselling facilitates a meaningful exchange across children, youth, and adults.
The intention behind our playful, connected, and compassionate family counselling approach is to create a secure base and positive parent-child interactions. Secure attachment makes a far more enjoyable and smoother child-rearing process. When parent-child interactions are nurturing, it builds a foundation of connectedness, security, and love. This can also encourage the growth of emotional maturity in children and youth, including their ability to express their needs in relation to others, share their challenges with their caregivers, and identify, express, and manage their emotions in healthier ways.
Parenting tips are great, but don’t mean much if our kids don’t emotionally trust us or feel safe and secure with us. When children feel seen, heard, supported, and emotionally soothed, parenting tips and strategies work way better and more often! For this reason, at Nurture Psychology, family sessions focus on improving the quality of the relationship between caregivers and children. A focus is also paid to the important relationship of co-parents to be able to get on the same page and support each other’s child rearing decisions and practices.
Family sessions emphasize the importance of celebrating family moments of great accomplishment or regrouping as a unit in moments of great let downs. Families learn to approach difficult choices and decisions with more understanding and compassion for each other’s position or perspective. Conflicts are openly explored with curiosity and the steps to healthy repairs take place between family members.
In family work at Nurture Psychology, a focus is on creating secure templates that allow you to listen and respond to your children with kindness, warmth, and nurturance instead of refusal, defensiveness, dismissal, or avoidance. In treatment, parents and families build attachment knowledge that incorporates compassion and playfulness to reduce tension and stress within the home, increase parents’ understanding of their child or youth so they can better relate to each other, and allow parents to find new ways to enjoy parenting.
All children and families inevitably experience pain and suffering. This does not mean they failed or are not good enough. It means they are all human. Families can learn to buffer pain through connection and support with one another. For this reason, parents learn to attune to their child’s emotional states. Family sessions involve practicing co-regulation, so that as a parent you can help your child return to a state of calm. This practice may also take place between two adults, so one co-parent can help settle the upsets of the other dysregulated or hurt co-parent. Suffering in the arms of caring family members is far less painful than suffering alone or in isolation. It is about being there for each other.
Family Sessions Can Help To:
- ‘Earn’ secure attachment with your child or family members through emotional connection and co-regulation
- Understand your parent-child or family cycle
- Get back in sync with your child and/or co-parent
- Build trust and repair conflicts with family members
- Learn secure ways to empathically respond to your child or other family members
- Learn to attune to your child’s emotions, needs, and inner world
- Address underlying issues from which a child’s difficult behaviours emerge
- Build playfulness, laughter, and improve family quality time together
Parenting sessions
Let’s face it. Parenting isn’t always easy or pretty. It’s definitely a privilege but also a great responsibility and many times can be a great deal of parental stress. Yes, it comes with highs and lows. Moments of true joy and pleasure and moments of sheer overwhelm, confusion, and distress. That’s why we aren’t meant to parent alone!
Parents do the very best that they can with what they have. But not all parents have the same access to a secure relationship (past or present), to the same level of support from family or friends, or to the same healing information throughout their parenting journey. It doesn’t help that the parenting environment has also become incredibly stifling, focused on the great implications of child rearing, along with fears about engaging in the “wrong” or potentially “harmful” parental practices. There is just way too much competing and mixed information about “what to do” or “not do” and “how to do it,” leaving parents feeling confused and sometimes in a place of despair.
At Nurture Psychology, we help you sort through all the mixed emotions and information. Parenting sessions can bring clarity, having little to say about right vs wrong, but rather focusing on the significance of what you do and considering the reasons behind your parental decisions. Our aim is to focus on what is needed for your child and family to thrive, by giving you a safe place to openly explore your own parental beliefs, attitudes, behaviours, emotional experiences, or your emotional availability without judgement or ridicule. Reflective parenting is the most effective way to promote growth in our children! For this reason, parents are also given the opportunity to reflect on ways in which they can respond best to their child’s big emotions or behavioural reactions, with an emphasis on learning to connect over correct or being able to respond calmly rather than react strongly to them.
Many factors influence how we parent our children, including stress or our early childhood experiences with our own parents. At Nurture Psychology, we help you manage the stresses of parenting, by learning to let go of unnecessary parental expectations, blame, self-criticism or judgement. We allow parents to reflect on their own upbringing, as knowing about how early attachment patterns developed with their caregivers in childhood can be a huge step in cultivating a secure attachment with their own children or can help achieve shifts in relating to their own children in more secure ways.
It is important to us that parents feel heard, understood, and valued. We respectfully support parents in navigating difficult parental moments or challenges, while honouring their parental integrity and good intentions for their child’s wellbeing. We ensure that parents understand how to parent from a secure attachment base, increasing their ability to soothe their child’s emotions when they may be frightened or uncomfortable, as well as focusing on those moments to encourage their child to feel confident to explore their world or strive for independence and autonomy. We ensure parents understand how to balance setting healthy boundaries and limits in loving and nurturing ways. Parents come to learn how to express compassion toward their children, while also practicing compassion for themselves along the way in their parenting journey.
Parenting Sessions Can Help To:
- Navigate difficult parental moments and challenges
- Build your parental confidence and reduce confusion or doubt
- Learn to create structure and hold boundaries with compassion and clarity
- Learn to respond calmly instead of reacting to your child
- Manage the stresses of parenting, including the practical work (cooking, cleaning, etc.), and your own needs for control, expectations, and to-dos
- Focus on connecting with your child over correcting their behaviours
- Sort through mixed emotions and/or parenting information
- Cultivate secure parenting
Psychological Services in Calgary
for Adults
The most valuable gift we can give ourselves or our loved ones is our own personal growth.
Our approach to adult psychology centres on establishing healthy, secure attachments in our relationships. To do this, sometimes we must look at ourselves or our past to be able to understand attachment patterns and learned ways of relating to others or coping with our emotional distress.
Many things can get in the way of healthy, secure attachments in adulthood. One factor is our own childhood experiences or a lack of secure attachment in childhood. It’s not only about what happened to us, but the way we’ve made sense of our childhood experiences and our understanding of how it impacted our development.
The quality of our early relationships with caregivers are vital to how we experience ourselves (worthy vs unworthy), others (reliable vs unreliable), as well as shape our view of the world (safe vs. unsafe). Exploring your views and past experiences in therapy can offer you the opportunity to receive compassion for your life’s suffering as well as build insight into why you might do what you do.
For some people, early childhood traumas experienced left them feeling abandoned, rejected, alone, or not cared for. Some persons experienced parents who were uncomfortable with emotions and either dismissed feelings avoidantly or anxiously responded to feelings in intrusive ways. As a child you may have felt dismissed, overwhelmed, or scared in your most vulnerable emotional states or left alone with your most difficult life experiences.
Early childhood trauma can impact how you relate to others in your adult relationships, sometimes contributing to a lack of closeness, safety, trust, or insecurity in adult partnerships. Similarly, it may impact how to relate to your child, never having experienced a person who was capable of reading your emotions accurately or soothing your distress.
The good news is that attachment patterns can change. No matter what kind of attachment you experienced growing up, you can “earn” secure attachment through your own trauma reprocessing and healing. Improving the quality of your attachments through trauma reprocessing can transform your sense of belonging.
At Nurture Psychology, we offer our adult clients specialized trauma treatment through an approach called Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR) Treatment or Internal Family Systems (IFS) Treatment. Both of these treatments have been highly effective in healing survivors of abuse, neglect, trauma, PTSD, dissociation, grief/loss, anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, and more.
Working through early childhood traumas can allow you to become who you were meant to be if you had not experienced the trauma. It may allow you to achieve a sense of wholeness. Other benefits of trauma treatment include developing self-compassion or compassion for others. Parents may come to learn how to connect better with their children and family dynamics can become healthier. Coupled relationships can be strengthened. Your sense of companionship, fulfillment, and performance in the workplace can improve.
The therapeutic process for our adult clients can involve other family members. This can be valuable to support the counselling process or to deepen understanding and emotional connection.
Adult Psychology Sessions Can Help To:
- Reflect on attachment patterns you developed in childhood
- Heal adverse childhood experiences, traumas, or insecure attachment patterns through trauma reprocessing
- Reflect on your emotional responses and coping to life’s difficulties
- Meet unmet attachment needs
- Say goodbye to perfection and self-blame
- Get unstuck and move forward in your life
- Choose healthier, secure adult partnerships
- Build compassion for yourself and others
Psychological Services in Calgary
for Couples
OUR EMOTION-FOCUSED APPROACH TO COUPLES COUNSELLING
Couples Counselling Sessions Can Help To:
- Cultivate secure attachment or address insecure attachment patterns
- Learn how to listen and respond instead of react or shut down
- Address problematic couples cycles
- Meet each other’s relationship needs
- Resolve differences of opinion and improve conflict resolution skills
- Improve lines of communication to be able heard and understood
- Achieve deeper and more intimate conversations, sharing your feelings and concerns more openly
- Improve your ability to turn to each other in times of distress or discomfort
- Improve emotional availability and soothing in the relationship
- Spark joy and playfulness in your partnership
- Address any relationship traumas experienced
- Improve sexual intimacy and affection
- Explore ways to get closer, to improve affection, nurturance, and compassion
- Deepen understanding, warmth, and affection
Online Psychological Services in Calgary (Telepsychology)
In addition to in-person sessions, Nurture Psychology also offers virtual therapy sessions for children, youth, families, couples, and adults. These sessions take place online; they are also called “telepsychology” or “virtual counselling sessions”.
Counselling sessions over video can be ideal for people who live outside of Calgary but within Alberta, for people who are experiencing anxiety and cannot come into the office, or during times of public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our video sessions take place over Jane App, a secure video conferencing solution that secures your information and safeguards your privacy. Jane App has robust security and encryption controls in place to protect client data that complies with Privacy Laws, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada. Audio and video content from telepsychology sessions is not saved. No one can access the sessions, either when they are taking place or at a later time.
Virtual counselling sessions are only available to clients residing in Alberta, Canada. Virtual counselling sessions cannot be offered to clients living or travelling outside of the province of Alberta due to licensing requirements and restrictions.
Please make sure that you are in a confidential physical space and set aside the time so you are free from interruptions or distractions before you begin your video (online) counselling session.
Our warm, inviting space in Calgary
