Ruth-Ellen

Your path in life may take some unexpected turns and it is an honour to walk beside you for part of the journey. Ruth-Ellen is a Child and Family Therapist, a Registered Psychotherapist and has graduate and post-graduate training in Play Therapy, Family Therapy and Couple Therapy. She began her career focusing mostly on adults, but for the last 10 years has expanded her focus to include children, youth, parents/caregivers and families. She strongly believes that, wherever possible, caregivers need to be consistently involved in their child's therapy, in order to make long-term change possible outside of sessions. She is also committed to strengthening attachments in family relationships, as another important factor in creating positive change. See the chart below for the types of struggles she has helped people with and the types of approaches she uses. Faith-based (Christianity) support is available upon request, and Ruth-Ellen can also thoughtfully address Indigenous concerns when relevant. Ruth-Ellen uses an experiential/interactive approach, especially with young clients. She notes that children generally don't use "talk therapy." Instead, they use toys to represent people and situations and proceed to role play/process real-life experiences in this way. Therefore, when seeing children, Ruth-Ellen might use relevant toys, story telling, puppetry, role play, games, visual art, music, movement, fun attachment activities and more.