Christian Psychologist Calgary

Approach to Therapy

Over the past seventeen years in Calgary, we have been working to restore marriages, transform families, break cycles of addiction, and provide spiritual direction. Undergirding all of our services is our core belief and hope in the power of restoration.

• Belief in Restoration — Our belief in restoration informs our therapeutical approach in all of our numerous services. We seek to set clients free by working to resolve marriage and family conflict, improve communication and intimacy skills, and provide guidance through sexual and/or relational difficulties. We provide couples’ relationship therapy, marriage and family co-counseling, divorce prevention and recovery services, therapy for recovery from affairs and infidelity, and sex therapy. We also work with with chemical, sexual and other forms of addiction, and provide services for spiritual direction.

• Couples Therapy — In our marriage and relational therapy, our therapy approach is greatly informed by the work of Dr. John Gottman, a world-famous psychologist. Dr. Gottman spent two decades studying the factors that make a marriage succeed or fail. He discovered that it wasn’t the presence of conflict or whether or not couples argued that mattered, but how they handled the conflict and resolved it that would determine whether or not their marriage would last. One of his students, Dr. Sue Johnson (a Christian herself), drew from his work to create a powerful approach to psychotherapy for couples, called “emotion focused therapy” (EFT). EFT has gone on to become one of the most effective and well-researched methods of relational therapy available. It centres on accepting, understanding and using the adaptive nature of emotion to guide us in our understanding of our needs and wants. This allows you to co-create positive patterns and attachments in your marriage. Our considerable experience with EFT will foster an environment that will give you the tools you need to experience and express your emotional needs in the safety of our sessions.
  

• Addiction — Our approach to therapy for addiction is essentially a “third way”. When dealing with addiction, people tend to cling to one of two positions: the first, that addiction is a choice; the second, that it is a disease.
  
  The first group tends toward empowerment (and thus, the danger of judgement), the latter, toward compassion (creating the danger of passivity). We believe that neither of these positions is correct.
  
  Addictions - all of them - are a result, not of choice or disease, but of trauma.
  
  Our approach to our addictions therapy is informed by our belief that trauma underlies addiction. New research is rapidly verifying the addiction-trauma connection. We draw from the work of Gabor Maté, a pioneer in the field of addiction and an advocate for the trauma connection. Maté is a physician and psychologist who works with inner-city drug addicts at insite injection centers in Vancouver. Maté’s theory of addiction is that it is rooted in childhood abuse. He believes that the first five years of a child’s life (and the environment in the womb) can dictate the likelihood of addiction. Stress, abuse and lack of love and attachment can lead to deficiencies in a child’s ability to process distress and reregulate emotional states. Maté holds that addictions are a result of deficiencies in a person’s neural system that leave them with a perceived need to self-medicate.
  
  In our sessions, we will work from help you to uncover and heal any trauma that may be underlying your addiction.