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Starting couples counseling often involves more than deciding to ask for help. Cost can be a big deciding factor in whether or not to seek help, especially when a relationship already feels strained and it is hard to know what support will actually be covered. In Canada, there isn’t any universal mental health care, despite more than a third of Canadians wanting it, and provincial healthcare plans generally only fund mental health services delivered through hospitals, community programs, or physician-based care, rather than psychotherapy in private practice.

Every family experiences moments of tension, uncertainty, or transition where communication can become strained and misunderstandings may grow, often affecting the entire family. Family therapy offers a supportive space where relatives can slow things down and work through challenges together. At Oak & Sands Counselling, our mental health professionals and trained family therapists can work collaboratively with the whole family to strengthen connection, improve family communication, and support healthier dynamics within the family unit.

Marriage and family therapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on relationships, communication, and the patterns that develop between people over time. It can involve couples, families, co-parents, or one person attending alone to work on relationship dynamics. At Oak & Sands Counselling, we provide relationship and family-focused counselling as part of a broader practice that also includes support for children, teens, women, and men. If you’re trying to understand what this type of therapy actually looks like in practice, the sections below walk through the most common questions we hear.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a structured form of psychotherapy that was originally developed to treat borderline personality disorder (BPD). It is widely used because it targets problems that commonly occur in BPD, including intense emotions, impulsive behaviour, and self-harm risk. DBT is also used for mental health conditions where emotion regulation is a core difficulty.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, is a structured mental health method used to help people work through traumatic memories and other distressing material. It’s best known for its role in treating post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and its use has expanded to include other concerns as well.  At Oak & Sands Counselling Services, EMDR is one of the therapy modalities we offer alongside couples therapy, family therapy, therapy for women, counselling for teens, therapy for men, and counselling for children. If you’re exploring EMDR for the first time, it can help to know what the appointment itself looks like, including answering questions like how long does a typical EMDR therapy session last and why the timing is part of the work.

CBT is one of the most researched forms of psychotherapy, and it’s also one of the most misunderstood. It often gets boiled down to “just think differently,” when it’s really a structured way of tracking how your thoughts shape your emotions, then practicing new responses until they start to feel natural.  At Oak & Sands Counselling Services, we offer CBT as part of an evidence-based therapy practice that also includes EMDR, couples counselling, family therapy, and support for teens, children, women, and men. If you’re looking for a clear starting point, our breakdown below explains what CBT can change, how it works, and when it may be the right fit.

People rarely arrive at therapy looking for theory. They come because something keeps repeating, and they are tired of feeling caught in it. Cognitive behavioral therapy, often shortened to CBT, offers a practical way of understanding those patterns and changing them. It is a structured, goal-oriented form of talk therapy with strong evidence behind it for concerns such as anxiety disorders, depression, grief, stress, insomnia, chronic pain, and many mental health conditions.

In high stress moments, it’s common for emotions to feel intense and the space between feeling and acting seems too narrow. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a skills-based therapy grounded in mindfulness and behavioral change, and developed for helping with mental health conditions that cause intense emotions and have difficulty with emotional regulation skills such as borderline personality disorder or people with suicidal behaviors.