Family Counselling
When the difficulty lives between people, not inside one of them.
Family counselling at Westpeak Wellness is relationship work involving more than one family member, delivered by secure video across British Columbia by a Registered Clinical Counsellor (MA, RCC), in English or Punjabi. It treats the pattern between people rather than one person's behaviour, and is used for recurring conflict, communication that has broken down, adult children and parents who cannot talk, blended-family adjustment, and the distance that opens between generations in immigrant families. Not everyone needs to attend every session.
- 50 minutes per session
- Secure video sessions
- Free 15-min consult
- MA, RCC · BCACC
Families rarely arrive because one person is unwell. They arrive because something between them keeps happening — the same argument, the same silence, the same subject nobody can raise. Family counselling works on that pattern, with the people who are part of it in the room.
How we approach it
Sessions are structured rather than open-ended, and nobody is put on trial. The first job is usually to establish what each person thinks is happening, because families frequently discover they have been solving different problems. Who attends can change session to session — sometimes the useful work is with two people, not five.
It is not couples therapy with more chairs
Couples work has two people and a shared decision to make about the relationship. Family work often has an uneven set: someone who wanted to come, someone who agreed to, and someone who is there because the others asked. That difference shapes everything about how a session runs.
It also means the goal is rarely agreement. It is far more often a way of disagreeing that does not cost anyone the relationship — which is a lower bar than families expect and a much more durable one.
Where the pattern is older than the people in the room, intergenerational trauma covers what that looks like and why it repeats.
Might be a fit if
What people tend to arrive with
The same argument, different night
The subject changes and the shape does not. That is a pattern, and patterns are workable.
Nobody can raise the actual thing
Everyone knows what it is. It has been unsayable for long enough that saying it now feels dangerous.
Parents and adult children have gone quiet
Contact continues; conversation does not. Often the language of the relationship changed and nobody named it.
One person's difficulty has become everyone's
Illness, addiction or crisis in one member reorganises the whole family, usually without anyone agreeing to it.
Recognise several of these? A free 15-minute consultation is the least committal way to find out whether this is the right approach — including if the answer turns out to be something else.
Questions
Before you book
Does everyone have to come?
No. Useful family work regularly happens with two or three people rather than everyone, and who attends can change between sessions. It is worth raising on the free consultation, because the answer depends on what is actually going on.
Can sessions run in Punjabi?
Yes — in Punjabi, English, or moving between them within one session, which is frequently what family sessions need when parents and adult children are most fluent in different languages.
What if someone refuses to attend?
That is common and it is not a dead end. Work can start with whoever is willing, and a family pattern often shifts when one person changes how they respond to it. Nobody is required to be there.
Is this for teenagers?
This practice works with adults. Where a child or teenager is the focus, you would be pointed toward a service set up for that rather than booked in — see [our standards and scope](/standards).
More in the full FAQ, or see fees and extended health coverage.
Explore more
Other ways we can work together
Keep going
Other counselling services
Therapy starts with one conversation.
Book a free 15-minute consultation over secure video. No pressure — just a chance to see if we’re a good fit.
Book Free ConsultationLooking on behalf of someone else? What to send them, and what not to — including the funded routes most people do not know they qualify for.