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The impact of what a few simple words have made throughout our sessions . With your candid observations you have filled my world with endless possibilities, fewer doubts and an incredible awareness of who I am. My time with you is so special... My accomplishments since I have come to see you are leaps and bounds. I couldn't have done it without you... really! - B.B.  |
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Laura Bradley - Clinical Director and TherapistLaura Bradley is a registered Master Practitioner in Counselling Psychology (MPCP) with the Canadian Professional Counsellors Association and a Certified Group Facilitator. Laura has worked in the field since 1993 and she posses a wealth of experience working with Couples, individuals, and families in the areas of communication, intimacy and depression. Since 2004, Laura has been teaching two levels of Practitioner training, a three-year counselling training program with Clearmind International. She has developed and facilitated personal growth workshops and has considerable experience facilitating group work. Laura is also a community trainer and educator. Her main areas of expertise are relationships, post partum adjustment, family dynamics and parenting. She has appeared on City TV, was an expert guest for C-Fun radio, and has contributed to articles in The Globe and Mail and Today's Parent in regards to post partum and parenting issues. Laura's path to becoming a counsellor began with her own struggle with post partum depression after her son was born in 1991; she cites her years of working with parents as "a huge influence on who I am as a therapist." She is driven by the desire to give her children, herself and others the opportunity to create what they want out of their lives. Treatment PhilosophyMy vision is to support clients in journeying inward to discover their true potential. Integral to my therapeutic style is my belief about the purpose of struggle in our lives, and how and what we use our struggles for. We have ways of avoiding our feelings, our pasts, and our limiting beliefs about ourselves and others; for example, we distance from those we most want to be intimate with, or develop patterns of addiction, or have affairs. These means of avoidance are like a temporary fix for a bigger problem; they give us momentary feelings of satisfaction, excitement, or completeness. They hold the promise of the fulfillment of whatever we deem to be lacking in our lives, but, ultimately, they fail, and we are left alone and with ourselves, back at the state of the original problem. These patterns of thought and behaviour are no longer working for us; however, if we can only see our struggles with these patterns as signals, or, if you will, flag posts, indicating that there is something to be uncovered and discovered, then we can use our struggles to help expand ourselves, our relationships, and the world. So, the places of our struggles become rich sites of excavation and exploration. For me, the counselling process is an opportunity to heal past hurts and the false beliefs we have made up about ourselves, others and the world around us, since these things create separation. In counselling, we start to heal the beliefs that keep each and every one of us separate, and we walk towards intimacy and connection. Sessions, therefore, do not follow a prescribed formula; they are a process, and it is you that sets the curriculum and the pace. I am there to facilitate and support you reaching your goals, but you are the one ultimately responsible. I believe that counselling is a collaborative process, where both the client and counsellor work together to meet life goals. Counselling provides a compassionate and non-judgmental presence that supports you in exploring what you need in order to expand and to reclaim the gifts of the past, and to find your own direction from the inside. I seek to use the counselling methods that are best suited to each client's particular needs. My counselling perspective is mainly based on philosophy from Bowen Systems Theory, A Course In Miracles, and Transpersonal Counselling, although I also make use of Neuro-Linguistic Processing, Gestalt and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Bowen Family SystemsBowen Family Systems is a counselling perspective that views the family as an emotional unit and uses systems thinking to describe all interactions in the family. It is the nature of a family that its members are intensely connected emotionally. Often people feel distant or disconnected from their families, but this is more feeling than fact. Family members so profoundly affect each other's thoughts, feelings, and actions that it often seems as if people are living under the same "emotional skin." We are all born into the emotional environment of the family. In our families, we learn how to deal with the world and others. From our families we learn both strengths and weaknesses; the weaknesses we learn may lead to ways of interacting more out of our feeling and anxiety state than from our beliefs and principles. Therapy based on Systems Thinking gives us a way of exploring the family's way of perceiving the world. It offers a way to change how we think about ourselves, and, over time, work toward altering our perceptions, with the goal of finding a more open, honest and effective way of relating and connecting to the people in our family, community and the world we live in. One of the most important aspects of this theory to me as a therapist is that this theory does not view the person as the problem, but rather sees the relationship dynamics as the problem. Transpersonal PerspectiveAlbert Einstein was once asked what he thought the most important question someone could ask. Einstein responded: "Is the universe a friendly place?" For me, the bottom line of the transpersonal perspective is the belief that the world is a friendly place. From a transpersonal perspective, you can start to look at obstacles in your life as stepping stones to your purpose on this planet.Ultimately we are all interconnected. Everything and everybody is related in a circular manner. Transpersonal Counselling is a counselling therapy that addresses each aspect of the human being: the emotional, mental, spiritual and the physical. Every session is unique to the client, just as each individual is unique. Transpersonal Counselling is a weaving of spiritual, humanistic, and person-centered approaches, which expands the traditional theories about the psyche to include connecting and working with our higher, spiritual self. Transpersonal Counselling is based on the work of C.G. Jung, Carl Rogers, Roberto Assagioli and Abraham Maslow and many others. There are 4 guiding theoretical principles in Transpersonal Couselling that relate to Systems theory: firstly, everything is interconnected and affects everything else, and this interconnection means that problems don't happen in isolation, they occur in relationship, as part of a pattern; the second principle is that there is no such thing as an "objective" reality - it is a personal construction rather than an objective truth - and we learn our reality constructs from the womb on, through the eyes of our significant caregivers, who learned their reality from theirs, etc.; the third principle, which follows from the second one, is that our perceptions of reality are governed by the rules of our family system, even though the family members are not usually consciously aware of what those rules are; finally, Transpersonal Theory says that all systems (whether we are talking about a couple, a social group, a work environment, a family, a neighborhood, or an entire society) are trying to evolve, but the system can only change and grow proportionate to how open or closed the rules of the system are. My goal in this process is to align myself with the forces of growth and expansion by continually asking myself, "What would be an evolutionary step for this person?" A Course In MiraclesACIM (A Course in Miracles) is a self-study spiritual thought system that teaches that the way to universal love is through forgiveness. According to ACIM, all behaviour is either a cry or a call for love. The miracles referred to in the Course are shifts in perception, where true change happens. How does A Course in Miracles explain itself? The summary introduction of the text reads: "This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite." Education & Professional Registrations
I am continually updating skills by participating in community and professional workshops. |
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