Child Therapy in British Columbia
For kids with big explosions, quiet anxiety, grief, perfectionism, masking, and feelings that seem too big to manage alone.
Play Therapy for Childen 2-12
IN-PERSON ON PENDER ISLAND • ONLINE COUNSELLING THROUGHOUT BRITISH COLUMBIA
You know your child is struggling. You may not know why.
Maybe something has happened.
A death. A separation. A move. A frightening experience. A family change. A loss other people may not even recognize as a loss.
Or maybe there isn’t one clear event.
Your child explodes over things that seem impossibly small. They’re angry, reactive, refusing, melting down, or suddenly impossible to reach.
Or they’ve gone the other direction. They worry about getting things wrong. Try desperately to be good. Watch everyone else’s feelings. Mask all day. Hold it together everywhere else and fall apart at home.
Sometimes they do both.
You may know—or wonder—if your child is neurodivergent, and be looking for someone who understands their brain without treating it as something that needs to be fixed.
From the outside, the behaviour can be confusing.
It usually makes much more sense when we understand what’s happening underneath it.
Sometimes distress explodes outward.
It might look like:
Anger, rage, or aggression
Meltdowns that seem wildly out of proportion
Defiance or refusal
Yelling, arguing, or constant conflict
School refusal
Rigid or controlling behaviour
And sometimes it pulls inward.
It might look like:
Anxiety or constant worrying
Clinginess or difficulty separating
Reassurance-seeking
Perfectionism or fear of disappointing people
Shutting down or avoiding
Masking all day and falling apart at home
And some children move back and forth between the two.
Grief, loss, and when life changes suddenly
Children can be deeply affected by experiences adults sometimes expect them to “bounce back” from.
Therapy can help after:
The death of someone important
Divorce, separation, or changes between caregivers
Moving or changing schools
The loss of a friendship or important relationship
A frightening or traumatic experience
Medical experiences or hospitalization
Unexpected separation from someone they love
Other changes that have shaken their sense of safety or stability
The goal isn't to make your child forget what happened or stop having feelings about it.
It's to help them make sense of what happened in the ways children naturally do, build more capacity for the feelings that come with it, and find more room for safety, expression, connection, and choice.
What play therapy can actually look like
Therapy with kids doesn’t have to mean sitting upright, maintaining eye contact, and answering:
“So, how does that make you feel?”
We might build things, tell stories, use characters, draw, move, make things, create worlds, make an enormous mess—or follow whatever becomes important in the play.
Play is one of the ways children make sense of their world. Through it, they can explore safety, relationships, power, fear, loss, anger, vulnerability, belonging, and experiences they may not yet know how to explain.
I pay attention to what’s happening in the play, in your child’s nervous system, and in the relationship between us.
Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we create. Sometimes a child spends half the session building something and says three words.
I’m not trying to make their play look therapeutic.
I’m meeting them in the language they already speak.
And yes, this can also happen online.
For some children, being in their own environment is actually part of what helps.
They have their own toys, art supplies, pets, comfort objects, and familiar surroundings nearby. They have more control over movement and physical distance. And some kids are simply more able to let another person in when they don’t also have to manage that person physically being in their space.
They do not have to sit still and stare at me through a screen for 50 minutes.
Please don’t make them.
They can sit on the floor. Move around. Draw. Build something. Show me the dog. Look away. Pace. Crawl under a blanket.
I have seen plenty of ceilings, floors, nostrils, dark screens, stuffed-animal close-ups, blanket forts, and the undersides of furniture.
I’m fine.
Sometimes a little more distance makes connection easier.
Online therapy tends to work best once a child can comfortably communicate with me through a screen and manage the basic technology independently—including getting themselves logged back in if we're disconnected. For many kids, that's somewhere around age 8, but readiness matters more than age.
Online therapy is not right for every kid.
And I’m not going to pretend it is.
Some children need another person physically in tfhe room. Some need a shared play space or a level of support that online therapy can’t provide.
If I don’t think online therapy is a good clinical fit for your child, I’ll tell you.
The question isn’t whether online therapy is better or worse than in-person therapy. It’s whether it works for this kid.
Neurodivergent kids are welcome here.
ADHD, autism, AuDHD, PDA traits, sensory differences, giftedness, intense interests, big emotions, unusual communication styles, and nervous systems that don’t fit neatly into typical expectations are all welcome.
I’m not interested in teaching neurodivergent kids to look less neurodivergent.
We might work with anxiety, regulation, relationships, masking, self-understanding, grief, trauma, transitions—or the places where being neurodivergent has made something already difficult even harder.
The goal isn’t “normal.” It’s more understanding, more choice, more self-trust, and more room to be who they actually are.
A note about parents
You’re important to the work, particularly with younger children.
But your child’s therapy is still their therapy.
Depending on your child’s age and needs, we may have occasional parent check-ins or separate parent sessions to talk about what you’re seeing at home, patterns I’m noticing, and what your child may need from the adults around them.
I won’t give you a play-by-play of what happens in sessions. Children need to know that the therapeutic relationship belongs to them.
But helping a child often means helping the adults around them understand what their behaviour is communicating—and how to respond in ways that create more safety and connection.
Understanding behaviour doesn’t mean allowing harmful behaviour.
We don’t have to shame the behaviour, and we don’t have to let harmful behaviour run the house, either. We can understand what’s underneath it while still building boundaries, safety, regulation, and more options for responding.
I will, of course, involve you when there’s a safety concern.
Ready to begin?
Start with a free virtual consultation.
We’ll talk about what’s been happening, what you’re seeing at home, and what your child might need—and whether I think I’m a good fit to help.
You don’t need to have the whole story figured out before we talk.
