Services

I provide the following services as a counsellor and psychotherapist to clients in the greater Brisbane region. Please call or email me to discuss your needs and situation.

Individual, couple, and family counselling

Family Group Meetings

Consultancy

Individual, couple, and family counselling

It can be an anxious and nervous time to talk with a counsellor, especially if this is your first time, and it is understandable that some may be more comfortable than others when talking about their situation.

When you see me, you can expect me to listen with compassion and understanding and without judgement or discrimination. We all face difficult times and I will work with you to find new ways of moving through these issues towards a better future.

My counselling approach involves working with children, young people and adults to help resolve difficulties and remove barriers to enjoy more meaningful and satisfying lives.

I work through a family therapy framework known as Systemic and Family Therapy Psychotherapy. This involves working with individuals, couples, and families to build better ways of relating to others and in ways that are less destructive, as well as working to function in more helpful ways.

We do this by exploring the story of difficulties in your life and in the lifecycle of your family, and find new ideas for change that with support and coaching will replace older patterns of behaviour and connection.

Individuals are welcome to attend sessions by themselves or a couple can attend together to work through relational difficulties. If you are interested in family counselling, it is helpful to invite all the people involved to participate in the first session. From there, we will make a plan together about the next steps of the counselling process.

Counselling can help with:

• Relationship problems
• Intimacy issues
• Conflict between couples
• Stuck problems that do not seem to be able to be resolved
• Difficult and challenging behaviours in children
• Deciding whether to stay or leave a relationship
• Navigating the complexities of separation, divorce, remarriage, and integrating step-families and step-siblings
• Recovering from the death of a loved one, or significant loss
• Working through serious illness and its impact
• Working through the symptoms of disorders/dysfunction in individuals, the immediate family and extended families
• Difficult transitions through different life stages for yourself and/or your family

I treat you and your family’s privacy, and also providing the quality counselling services as my highest priorities.

I endeavour to ensure that my fees are affordable and to provide a value-for-money service.

Please contact me on 0452 521 054 or hello@stuarthenderson.com.au for a free 10 minute phone consultation.

Family Group Meetings

I provide specialist services to the Queensland Government through the facilitation of Family Group Meetings where there is Child Protection involvement.

The central idea of these meetings is to bring together professionals and families, when there are worries for the safety of children, in way that empowers families to work collaboratively alongside professionals to make decisions that will be in children’s best interests. You can expect me to work alongside you to generate ideas of how this meeting can be useful and helpful to build safety and work towards families goals.

Family group meetings tend to boil down to two different styles. The first is the meeting that is typically professionally-driven: professionals tend to make the decisions about what will be best and families and children often feel that they do not have a voice. These meetings tend to be shorter in time with less involvement from the extended family and kin.

The second type, which is my training, is to facilitate a family-driven or family-led meeting, where the family group are involved to support parents and children to making decisions that will be in the children's best interests. These meetings tend to involve adult family and community that are part of the child’s extended family and community network (grandparents, aunties and uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends, etc) to come together and be empowered to make decisions.

The meeting is separated into three different stages:

• The first stage is a time for information sharing where professionals, family and community are together to talk about worries, things that work well, and idea’s for a preferred future. Child Safety representatives use this time to also explain how they became involved, their worries if things do not change, and what it needs to look like in the future for them to cease their involvement. Although everybody does not always agree, all participants come along to be part of this meeting and set aside their own adult agendas for the day because the meeting is about the children and their future.
• The second stage is private family time where the professionals leave the room and the family and community stay to make decisions about how to meet the children’s needs so that Child Safety can cease their involvement. It can be especially hard for parents to invite family and community along for this time, and it is important that everyone who comes along knows that they are there for the children and what is in their best interests.
• The final stage is where the professionals come back into the room and hear the family’s decisions that they have made and agree on the plan. The purpose of this section is to have agreement from Child Safety that the plan addresses all of the worries that have been talked about.

These types of meetings tend to empower families to present their own ideas for how things can change, and give the most helpful type of support to children and parents during this time. My role as a facilitator is to meet with all the participants and prepare everyone for the meeting and what will be talked about, as well as generate new ideas with you to how things can be different in the future.

Consultancy

I provide consultation services to professionals, agencies, and Government departments in the following areas:

• Supervision
• Processes to help staff resolve complex and difficult cases
• Workshops and training
• Helping organisations work through stuck system issues and problems within group dynamics
• Developing and refining organisational Quality Management Systems and supporting organisations through the Human Services Quality Framework (HSQF)

Please contact me on 0452 521 054 or hello@stuarthenderson.com.au to discuss your professional needs.