Emily is a Family and Couples Therapist, (Clinical Social Worker) with over 30 years’ experience working across diverse sectors such as mental health, specialist child and family relationship services, family law settings and private practice.
Emily’s practice combines experience and knowledge with care and compassion. She provides a strong client centred approach, working collaboratively with couples to identify priorities, support wellbeing and work towards positive change. She believes it is important that couples gain hope, relief and a way forward right from the first session.
She have been an individual, couples and family therapist working across mental health, family violence prevention and child, parenting and family work/family law for over 30 years.
Some of the other areas of her expertise is:
1. Couples/Parenting issues that occur in the first 5 years of having a family.
2. Couples where there has been an affair.
3. Couples who have been together for a medium-long time and have drifted apart.
4. Couple issues that occur in the context of step families.
5. Couples trying to negotiate a gridlock issue, such as whether or not to have a family.
6. Couples issues that occur in the context of serious mental health issues.
7. Couple issues that occur in the context of parenting disagreements/parenting adolescents.
She can also offer:
1. Stepfamily formation or conflict resolution.
2. Parenting after separation
3. Supporting separating couples in managing their relationship and talking to children about the separation.
In her work with couples, she offers valuable tools to reduce stress and build communication confidence and competence. She also offers the opportunity to connect current relationship patterns with past life experiences, with the aim of assisting clients to gain new perspectives and greater insight and empathy for themselves and each other.
She assists a wide variety of individuals and couples from diverse cultural backgrounds and couples from LGBTIQ+ communities.
She has extensive experience working with individuals and couples who may be struggling with anxiety, depression, anger, past or current trauma and abuse, grief and loss, relationships difficulties across the life cycle, parenting struggles, separation and divorce and other life transitions. She also offers step family formation and transition work; recovery from experiences of family violence/ trauma and assistance to take responsibility for harmful behaviours in relationships.
She has a commitment to gain regular feedback from her clients, in order to create a safe and effective therapeutic relationship. She uses this feedback to inform her work, and is able to employ a combination of evidenced based relationship therapies, such as Emotion Focused Couples Therapy, Gottman and interpersonal neurobiological methods. She is also able to employ Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), systemic and narrative therapies.
