Who can attend counselling?

Individual counselling

We offer individual counselling for all aspects of relationship and family issues.

This can include understanding past relationships and how they impact on the present, or reflecting on starting a new relationship. Whatever your concern, we're here to support you. Counselling can help with understanding and integrating your experiences and moving on.

If you're currently in a relationship, you can attend relationship counselling alone or with your partner. Attending counselling alone can still be very beneficial for your relationship. If your partner decides to also attend sometime later, we can discuss how this can be managed.

Couple counselling

We often work with couples in our counselling service.

Appointments generally involve a couple working with a counsellor around key concerns they or the counsellor identify. These can often be about communication issues, and the impact of recent and past experiences. Couples also frequently come to us for support for conflict and with parenting, grief and loss, managing stress, life changes, financial stress and managing emotions.

We also offer pre-marital/pre-commitment and relationship transitions and education for couples. Find out more about the Prepare/Enrich program.

Counselling for children, young people, parents and families

We can offer family counselling for parents and families, including support for relationships between parents and their children or teenagers. We support you to build real solutions, informed by the strengths, wisdom and knowledge of family members. We focus on a whole-of-family approach with expertise working across the life cycle.

Family counselling is available at our centres in Ballarat, Boronia, Cranbourne, Kew, Sunshine, Shepparton and Traralgon.

View our other services for children and families.

How we can help

Our counsellors can help you and your family to assess needs, identify areas for change, and use your strengths to restore or repair your relationships, where safe and appropriate.

We can also see your child, teenager or adolescent for individual sessions.

For some families, there are times when it hasn’t been possible to seek help early, and stresses and difficulties have become very troubling, traumatic and sometimes unsafe. 

Our counsellors are highly skilled at responding to these situations and can assist and support all of the members of your family to relate to each other in a safer way.

Our counsellors will not:

• take sides
• make judgments about who is right or wrong
• tell you what to do or what decisions to make. 
  
  

Our counsellors will:

• guide you and your family members through a discussion of your feelings, experiences and options
• assist parents and work with all family members in a supportive and non-judgmental way
• support you to build real solutions, informed by the strengths, wisdom and knowledge of family members.

View all our resources