Counseling Services

From Family Interplay Education

Terry Sterrenberg (LCSW) is the co-founder of Family Interplay Education and has over 25 years of counseling experience helping individuals, couples and families with issues such as depression, coping with grief and loss, parenting issues, premarital relationship enrichment, marital difficulties, job related issues and adult adjustment concerns. His specialty is enhancing couple relationships, using a positive, dynamic, educational approach, and he is a certified clinician and workshop leader for the Gottman Insititute.

He uses a variety of techniques developed by John Gottman and others to teach skills. His goal is for clients to be able to use these skills as a matter of course in their daily lives. He discovered a passion for counseling during 10 years in the pastoral ministry. Then he attended the University of Calgary and received his Masters of Social Work in 1989. He is  part of the  group of clinicians formed in 1999 by John and Julie Gottman, and have been participating in training and consultation with the Gottman Institute since that time. He has been married for over 25 years, and has raised two sons

Laurie Simons MA, co-founder of Family Interplay Education, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with over 30 years experience helping parents, teachers and therapists to cope effectively with behavior concerns.   She has provided teacher and parent training regarding behavior problems and learning disabilities in both Canada and the United States.   She works with teachers, parents and families who are raising challenging children, including children with special needs. She has written and developed training materials, books and manuals for schools, hospitals and other agencies.  She parented a special needs foster child followed by raising two boys of her own.

Provides Parent counseling to:

•  Enhance and improve parent-child and sibling relationships

•  Increase confidence in parenting effectiveness

•  Understand and address challenging behaviors that are not responding to traditional behavior management approaches

•  Assist children who have difficulty with transitions, or who are anxious, inflexible, aggressive or explosive.

•  Implement adjustments in the home environment to ease difficulties that occur during morning or bedtime routines, meal times, chores, homework, or sibling interactions

•  Learn and practice specific parenting skills to increase children’s ability to respect boundaries, make polite requests, follow directions, cope with disappointment, take into account others’ points of view, and solve problems where everyone is a winner.

Parents are encouraged to participate in counseling sessions with their children, because parents are considered to be the key element of successful interventions. 

 Whole families play interactive games that are specially designed to assess and improve family interactions, including sibling rivalry.