Effective guidance requires a combination of experience and expertise: the ability to listen and connect, while having the skills to use that understanding to help bring about change.
Working with children, adolescents and teenagers requires a unique skill set: including patience, kindness and sincerity (children are quick to detect anything less). Gray Matters has always been dominated by its work with children of all ages, and with a huge variety of challenges.
We never hesitate to collaborate with our vast network of specialists (or with your doctors), always placing your child’s well-being first. Gray Matters has longstanding relationships with expert clinicians from a range of different fields, including psychiatrists, learning specialists, nutritionists and many others.
Finding a therapist that suits you is a deeply personal matter – like any relationship, it’s a matter of personal fit. At Gray Matters, our clinicians have extraordinary life experience, and have become specialists with different populations and different issues. By matching individual needs to the right clinician, we ensure therapy is a comfortable and constructive process.
With over 70 years of combined experience, our clinicians are experienced and comfortable using a variety of therapeutic techniques, and able to find the best approach for you. As your therapists, we will do our utmost to help you overcome whatever difficulties you face.
Relationships are difficult. They don’t endure because they are somehow different, or better, but rather because they’re more resilient against adversity. However good a relationships is, it is constantly buffeted by the pressures of daily life, and the influence of our environment.
Couples therapy is not just about resolving conflict. It’s about improving communication, restoring emotional connectedness, and remembering what brought you together. It’s about learning patience and tolerance, insight, and a resilience to the pressures that would thwart this.
Sometimes ending a relationship is easier than maintaining a healthy one. While some relationships do obviously end, we try our best to give you the tools to have happy and fulfilling relationships going forward.
Family therapy lies at the heart of Gray Matters. Frequently, when working with individuals, issues arise that require a more systemic approach. In particular, issues with children sometimes need a broader look at family function. (Aside from our training, sometimes it just takes a different perspective to see the issues that need addressing.)
Frequently, small adjustments in the family dynamic produce profound improvements to the wellbeing of the family. Often these changes are easy to implement, and require very little time. At Gray Matters we are experienced with many of the challenges faced by families, including but not limited to:
- Family conflict – between siblings and between parents and children
- Issues relating to adolescents and teenagers
- Changes to the family with divorce and remarriage, including step-parenting and the integration of step-children
- Challenges relating to relocation and change
No-one is born with parenting skills – they are learned by experience. We often begin with the skills we picked-up from our own parents (or a desire to parent differently from them!), and gradually find our own parenting style. But there are times when everyone could use some help – even the best parents can be “too close” to see how things could be improved. Furthermore, as children develop they present different parenting challenges, which can be complicated by other changes in the family.
Parenting, and family life in general, is made infinitely more challenging by issues such as divorce, remarriage, blending families, loss, or having children with special needs. At Gray Matters we bring decades of combined experience to the challenges you face.
The end of a marriage is undoubtedly one of the most difficult emotional experiences we face as adults. But while “divorce” takes place in a legal framework, the real process of separation is an emotional one – a process that often takes years. The echoes of a previous marriage (and divorce) often reverberate into subsequent relationships. Our role is to help you process these issues, so you can form new, healthier relationships.
Parenting issues that caused conflict in an intact marriage often become more problematic in divorce, and become complicated by children having to adapt to different homes with different parenting styles. Our role is to guide you through this process to minimize the stress on your family.
While divorce is a fundamentally emotional process, it is frequently resolved within an adversarial legal system. With already heightened emotions, the result can be catastrophic for the long-term health of your family. At Gray Matters our role is to remain focused on these longer-term issues, and help you restore perspective when you are all least able.
The team at Gray Matters brings a vast range of expertise in therapy modalities and life experiences to fit the needs of each and every individual.