Individual Therapy
1:1 sessions for the everyday weight of being human.
Individual therapy at Westpeak Wellness is one-to-one counselling delivered by secure video anywhere in British Columbia, provided by a Registered Clinical Counsellor (MA, RCC) registered with the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors. Sessions run 50 minutes, weekly or fortnightly. It suits anxiety, low mood, burnout, self-criticism, life transitions and long-standing patterns that have stopped responding to the obvious fixes. A free 15-minute consultation comes first, and there is no referral, diagnosis or waitlist required.
- 50 minutes per session
- Secure video sessions
- Free 15-min consult
- $140 per session
- MA, RCC · BCACC
Individual therapy is space that belongs entirely to you — to think out loud, make sense of what you're carrying, and work toward what "better" looks like on your terms. Sessions are 50 minutes, weekly or biweekly, and always online so you can meet from wherever you feel most at ease in BC.
How we approach it
The work is warm, direct, and paced to you. We start with your story and your goals, then draw on evidence-based approaches — CBT, EMDR, trauma-informed care — matched to what you actually need, not a one-size-fits-all script.
What individual therapy is actually for
Individual therapy has a reputation problem: it gets imagined either as crisis intervention or as an indulgence. In practice most of it is neither. It is a regular hour with someone whose only job in that hour is to pay attention to your situation, and who has no stake in any particular outcome.
That matters more than it sounds. Most of the people in your life are inside your situation — partners, family, friends, colleagues all have a position on what you should do, and you manage their reactions while you talk. A counsellor does not need managing. You can say the ugly version of the thought, the one you have edited out of every other conversation, and find out what it actually looks like once it is out of your head.
You do not need a diagnosis or a crisis to qualify. A great deal of useful work happens with people whose lives look fine from outside and feel heavier than they should from inside.
Might be a fit if
What people tend to arrive with
The same pattern keeps repeating
Different job, different relationship, same outcome — and enough self-awareness to notice it without being able to interrupt it.
You are functioning and exhausted
Everything gets done and none of it feels good. Often the version described on high-functioning anxiety.
A decision you cannot make
Career, relationship, whether to move, whether to stay — going in circles for months without getting closer.
Something changed and you have not caught up
A loss, a diagnosis, a separation, an ending. Not necessarily traumatic, just larger than you have had space to process.
You do not recognise your own reactions
Anger, numbness, or panic arriving out of proportion to what is in front of you.
You have nowhere to say it
Genuinely common in adulthood — a full life and no one available for the actual conversation.
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.
What the sessions look like
Sessions are 50 minutes, usually weekly at first, moving to every other week as things settle. Weekly is not a rule — it is that momentum is hard to build at longer intervals early on, and easy to maintain later.
The first session is mostly orientation: what brought you, some history, and what you want to be different. You are not expected to arrive with it organised, and "I don't know where to start" is a normal opening. There is a full walkthrough in the guide on what to expect in a first session.
After that, sessions tend to alternate between working on what is live that week and returning to the pattern underneath it. Some weeks are practical and skills-focused; some are not. Where the work touches trauma, it slows down deliberately — pacing is a clinical decision, not a delay.
On length: some people come for six sessions with a specific stuck problem and finish. Others work for a year. Both are legitimate, and it is a reasonable thing to ask about directly rather than leaving open-ended.
Questions
More on how this work runs
What the first month tends to look like
Individual therapy is the least specific thing on this list, which makes it the hardest to describe honestly. What follows is the shape it usually takes rather than a promise about yours.
Week one is orientation. Your account, in your order, plus the practical frame — confidentiality and its limits, how sessions run, what you want to be different. Most people talk more than they expected to and leave more tired than they expected to.
Weeks two and three are where a working focus emerges, and it is frequently not the one you arrived with. People come in for the job and find the job is the place a much older pattern is currently expressing itself. That is not a bait and switch; it is what happens when someone with training listens to two hours of your life.
Week four is usually the first review. What are we aiming at, is the approach right, and how often should we be meeting. If nobody has raised those questions by session five or six, raise them yourself.
A word on what individual therapy is not. It is not advice, and a counsellor who spends sessions telling you what to do about your life has drifted into something else. It is also not a place where you are assessed as a person — the material is patterns and circumstances, not character. And it is not open-ended by default: work with a clear target ends, and ending on purpose is part of it.
How to get more out of the hour
- Arrive with the week, not a report — The most useful opening is frequently the thing that happened on Tuesday that you have not stopped thinking about — not a tidy summary. Tidiness is a form of editing, and the edited version is usually less useful than the messy one.
- Say the thing you almost did not say — Most sessions contain one. It is nearly always the most productive sixty seconds available, and deferring it week after week is the single most common way therapy stalls.
- Disagree out loud — If an interpretation does not fit, saying so is not rudeness — it is the correction that makes the next one accurate. A counsellor who cannot be contradicted is not much use.
- Note things during the week — The material worth bringing arrives on Wednesday and is gone by Friday. Three lines on a phone is enough.
- Do the between-session thing badly — A failed attempt is better material than no attempt. Reporting that you did not manage it, and what got in the way, is genuinely more useful than a clean success.
- Say when something is not working — Early rather than at month five. It changes the plan instead of ending the work.
Before you book
How do I know if I need therapy?
There is no threshold you have to cross. A useful question instead: is something taking up more of your attention than you want it to, and have your own attempts to shift it stopped working? If so, it is a reasonable use of an hour.
How many sessions will I need?
It varies with what you are bringing. A specific, contained difficulty often takes six to twelve sessions. Long-standing patterns or trauma take longer. Your counsellor should be able to give you a rough sense after two or three sessions.
What if I do not like my counsellor?
Say so, or leave — both are acceptable. Fit predicts outcomes more reliably than technique does, and staying with a poor fit out of politeness wastes your money and your time.
Is it confidential from my employer or family?
Yes. The only limits are risk of serious harm to you or someone else, a child or vulnerable adult at risk, or a court order. These get explained in the first session.
More in the full FAQ, or see fees and extended health coverage.
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