How do I know if family counselling would be helpful for us?

Family counselling can be helpful when communication has become strained, conflicts feel repetitive or unresolved, or when a family is navigating a transition such as separation, parenting challenges, or a child’s emotional or behavioural concerns. You don’t need to be in crisis to benefit. Many families seek counselling to better understand one another, improve communication, and create a more supportive and connected environment at home.

Who should attend family counselling sessions?

This depends on your family’s needs and goals. In many cases, sessions include parents and children together, while in other situations, some sessions may involve just parents or individual family members. Your therapist will work collaboratively with you to determine who should attend and when, ensuring that each session is structured in a way that feels productive, safe, and appropriate for everyone involved.

What happens during a family counselling session?

Family counselling sessions focus on understanding patterns within the family system, improving communication, and working through challenges together. Your therapist may guide conversations, help each person feel heard, and introduce practical strategies for managing conflict or strengthening relationships. Sessions are collaborative and paced carefully to ensure that everyone feels supported, especially when discussing sensitive topics.

How long does family counselling take?

The length of family counselling varies depending on the concerns you are working through and your goals as a family. Some families attend for a short period to address a specific issue, while others engage in longer-term work to improve communication and relationships over time. Many families begin with weekly or biweekly sessions and adjust as progress is made.

What if family members are reluctant to attend counselling?

It’s very common for one or more family members to feel unsure or hesitant about starting counselling. Therapists are experienced in working at a pace that feels comfortable and in helping individuals feel heard rather than pressured. Even if not everyone is ready to fully engage at first, counselling can still be helpful in creating small shifts in communication and understanding that build over time.

How is family counselling different from individual counselling?

While individual counselling focuses on one person’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences, family counselling looks at the relationships and patterns between family members. The goal is not to assign blame, but to understand how each person contributes to the dynamic and how the family can move forward in a more supportive and connected way. This broader perspective often leads to more lasting and meaningful change.

Does parenting support therapy mean there's something wrong with me as a parent?

No — and this framing is worth challenging directly. Parents who seek support are typically more committed to their children's wellbeing, not less. The challenges that bring parents to therapy are often genuinely difficult — a child with complex needs, a family navigating real adversity, or a situation where the usual advice simply doesn't apply. Asking for help is a sign of taking parenting seriously, not of failing at it.

My child's behaviour is the problem — why would I come to therapy rather than bringing them?

Because the most effective place to create change is often in the parent-child relationship rather than in the child in isolation. Children's behaviour exists in a relational context. When parents understand what's driving the behaviour and change how they respond to it, children often shift significantly — sometimes without direct therapeutic work with the child at all. In many cases we work with both, but starting with parenting support is frequently the most efficient route.

What if my partner and I have very different parenting approaches?

That's one of the most common things parenting support addresses. Inconsistency between parents is often more disruptive to children than either approach in isolation. Therapy helps couples understand each other's instincts, find approaches they can both commit to, and manage the conflict that differences in parenting style can generate — without that conflict playing out in front of the children.

Can you help if my child has a diagnosis — ADHD, autism, anxiety?

Yes. Our team has experience working with parents of neurodivergent children and children with mental health diagnoses. Understanding how a diagnosis affects your child's experience and behaviour, and adjusting your parenting approach accordingly, is a significant part of what parenting support involves. We also offer psychological assessments if your child hasn't yet been assessed and you're wondering whether a formal evaluation would help.

We adopted our child — is your team equipped for the specific challenges that brings?

Yes — this is an area of genuine depth at Solasta. All of our clinicians have additional training in adoption-informed care and developmental trauma. Scott McKirdy and Dr. Gillian McKirdy are adoptive parents themselves, with published research on adoptive family experiences in Alberta. You can read more on our adoption and fostering support page.

How is parenting support different from the rest of family counselling?

Parenting support focuses primarily on the parent — their understanding, their strategies, their wellbeing, and their relationship with their child. The rest of what's on this page covers the family system as a whole, with multiple members in the room working on shared dynamics. In practice the two often overlap, and your therapist will help you figure out which focus — or combination — is most likely to help.

Resources

There is a lot of mental health information out there, and finding something genuinely useful can be surprisingly difficult. We have gathered some books, podcasts, apps, and other resources that clients may find interesting, practical, or thought-provoking.

This isn’t intended to be a clinical reading list, and you certainly don’t need to work your way through everything here. Some of these resources are grounded closely in psychological research, while others are personal, practical, or based on lived experience. Different resources will resonate with different people.

We’ve organized the list loosely by topic so you can explore whatever feels most relevant to you. We’ll continue adding to this page as we come across resources worth sharing.

Resources listed here are for general information and are not a substitute for psychological or medical care.

5-4-3-2-1 Grounding

When anxiety or stress spikes, sometimes it helps to have something simple to focus on.

The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique uses your five senses to bring your attention back to what’s happening around you:

5 things you can see
4 things you can touch or feel
3 things you can hear
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste

We created a free browser tool that walks you through the exercise step by step, so it’s easy to access when you need it.

Podcasts

Sometimes listening is easier than reading. These podcasts cover psychology, relationships, wellbeing, mental health, and the experiences of people navigating difficult periods in their lives.

The Happiness Lab
Yale professor Laurie Santos explores research on happiness, behaviour, decision-making, and the sometimes surprising things that influence wellbeing.

Unlocking Us
Brené Brown discusses vulnerability, courage, relationships, emotions, and human connection with a wide range of guests.

Ten Percent Happier
Conversations about meditation, mindfulness, psychology, and practical ways of managing the mind without requiring you to become a meditation enthusiast.

Therapy Chat
Conversations about psychotherapy, trauma, attachment, relationships, and emotional wellbeing.

The Hilarious World of Depression — Archive
An entertaining and often moving series in which comedians and other guests spoke candidly about their experiences with depression. The podcast is no longer producing new episodes, but its archive remains available.

We Can Do Hard Things
Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle, and Abby Wambach discuss relationships, identity, parenting, change, loss, and the complicated parts of being human.

Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel
Recorded and anonymized therapy sessions that offer a fascinating window into relationships, conflict, intimacy, and the conversations couples often struggle to have.

Autism & ADHD

Learning that you are autistic or have ADHD as an adult can sometimes change the way you understand years of experiences that previously seemed unrelated.

The resources below aren’t only for people with a formal diagnosis. They may also be interesting for people exploring neurodivergence, waiting for an assessment, supporting a family member, or simply trying to understand their own patterns of attention, sensory experience, social interaction, energy, and executive functioning.

Some focus on research and clinical ideas, while others are written from lived experience. Both perspectives can be valuable.

Reading

Unmasking Autism — Devon Price
Explores masking, identity, burnout, and the experiences of autistic people whose differences may have gone unnoticed or misunderstood for many years.

Divergent Mind — Jenara Nerenberg
Focuses particularly on neurodivergent women and people whose autism, ADHD, sensory differences, or other forms of neurodivergence may not fit traditional stereotypes.

Driven to Distraction — Edward Hallowell & John Ratey
A longstanding and accessible introduction to ADHD and the different ways it can affect everyday life.

NeuroTribes — Steve Silberman
A detailed history of autism, autism research, the neurodiversity movement, and changing ideas about what it means to be autistic.

Odd Girl Out — Laura James
A memoir about receiving an autism diagnosis in adulthood and reconsidering earlier experiences through that new understanding.

ADHD 2.0 — Edward Hallowell & John Ratey
A contemporary overview of ADHD with practical ideas for managing attention, motivation, relationships, and everyday functioning.

Podcasts

Divergent Conversations
Dr. Megan Neff and Patrick Casale explore autism, ADHD, AuDHD, masking, burnout, relationships, identity, and late identification from both professional and lived-experience perspectives.

ADHD reWired
Conversations and practical strategies focused on living with ADHD, executive functioning, productivity, relationships, and everyday challenges.

Autism Adulthood
Discussions about navigating adult life as an autistic person, including relationships, work, communication, sensory needs, and self-understanding.

Translating ADHD
ADHD coaches explore the patterns behind ADHD difficulties and practical ways of approaching attention, motivation, emotions, and executive functioning.

Apps & Tools

Apps won’t replace therapy or assessment, but the right tool can sometimes make one particular part of everyday life a little easier.

Tiimo
A visual daily planner designed with neurodivergent users in mind. It can be useful for routines, time awareness, planning, reminders, and breaking the day into manageable steps.

Forest
A simple focus tool that turns staying away from your phone into a game: remain focused and your virtual tree grows; leave the app and you risk losing it.

Focus Keeper
A straightforward focus timer based on timed periods of work and breaks. Useful for people who find it easier to start a task when they only have to commit to a short period of focused work.

General Apps & Tools

Apps aren’t a replacement for therapy, but they can be useful for practising skills between sessions, building routines, tracking patterns, improving sleep, or simply creating a little more space in a busy day.

MindShift CBT
A free anxiety-management app from Anxiety Canada. It includes CBT-based tools for worry, panic, social anxiety, perfectionism, and other common anxiety difficulties, along with exercises for challenging unhelpful thinking and gradually facing fears.

Calm
A popular meditation and relaxation app with guided meditations, breathing exercises, sleep stories, music, and other resources designed to support relaxation and sleep.

Headspace
Guided mindfulness and meditation exercises covering stress, sleep, focus, anxiety, and general wellbeing. Its structured courses can be helpful for people who are interested in mindfulness but aren’t quite sure where to begin.

Insight Timer
A large library of guided meditations, music, sleep resources, breathing exercises, and mindfulness content. A substantial amount of its content is available for free, making it a good option if you want to experiment with different approaches or teachers.

Daylio
A simple mood and activity tracker that lets you record how you’re feeling and what you’ve been doing without having to write a full journal entry. Over time, it can help you notice patterns between mood, sleep, activities, relationships, exercise, and other parts of daily life.

Finch
A self-care and habit-building app built around looking after a small virtual pet. It combines goals, routines, reflections, breathing exercises, and other wellbeing activities in a playful format that can make everyday self-care feel a little less like another item on the to-do list.

How We Feel
A free emotional wellbeing app designed to help people identify and describe what they’re feeling. It includes a detailed emotion vocabulary, brief reflections, and strategies for responding to different emotional states.

Bearable
A tracking app that allows you to record mood, energy, sleep, symptoms, habits, medications, and other factors in one place. It can be useful for people trying to understand patterns in how they feel and what might be contributing to better or more difficult days.

Reflectly
A guided journaling and mood-tracking app for reflecting on emotions, experiences, and patterns over time. It may appeal particularly to people who like the idea of journaling but find a completely blank page difficult to start with.

Breathe2Relax
A straightforward tool for practising diaphragmatic breathing and using breathing exercises to manage stress. It’s deliberately simple, which can be an advantage when you want a breathing exercise rather than an app with dozens of additional features.

CBT-i Coach
A free app developed to support strategies used in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia. It includes sleep education, relaxation exercises, sleep tracking, and tools for developing healthier sleep habits. It can be useful alongside professional treatment, although it isn’t intended to replace treatment for persistent sleep problems.

Goblin Tools
A collection of simple tools that can be particularly useful when executive functioning is getting in the way. Its best-known feature can break a vague or overwhelming task into smaller, more manageable steps, and other tools can help with estimating how long tasks might take or adjusting the tone of written communication.

Smiling Mind
A mindfulness and wellbeing app developed by an Australian nonprofit organization. It offers guided programs for adults, children, families, schools, and workplaces, with many resources available for free.

Day One
A digital journaling app for people who prefer a more open-ended approach. Entries can include writing, photographs, and other details, making it useful for reflection, gratitude practices, or simply keeping track of experiences over time.

Medito
A free meditation and mindfulness app from the nonprofit Medito Foundation. It includes guided meditations, introductory courses, breathing exercises, sleep content, and longer meditation practices without requiring a paid subscription for its core library.

A Note About Mental Health Resources

Books, podcasts, websites, and apps can be excellent ways to learn more about yourself, discover new perspectives, or pick up practical strategies. They also vary considerably in the quality of their evidence and won’t necessarily be a good fit for everyone.

We encourage a little healthy skepticism. You don’t have to agree with everything an author, podcast host, or app tells you for a resource to be useful.

If something you read or hear raises questions about your own mental health, you can always bring it into therapy and talk it through with your psychologist or counsellor.

Looking For Some Support?

Resources like these can be a helpful place to start, but sometimes it helps to talk things through with someone.

Solasta Counselling offers counselling and psychological assessment in Calgary, as well as online services across Alberta. If you’re not sure what kind of support would be the best fit, you can start with a free 20-minute consultation.