Understanding Yourself, Your Emotions, and Your Experiences
Life can present challenges that leave us feeling overwhelmed, anxious, disconnected, or uncertain about how to move forward. These difficulties may arise from current circumstances, earlier experiences, or patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating that have become difficult to change. Counselling offers an opportunity to understand what is happening, consider new perspectives, and find ways to address challenges affecting your well-being and relationships.
At Touchstone Counselling, Linda McFalls, Ph.D., LCSW, RSW, brings more than 30 years of clinical and professional experience to individual psychotherapy, integrating advanced therapeutic training, clinical judgment, and current research.
Potential Concerns addressed in Individual Counselling
Trauma and Difficult Life Experiences: Trauma may result from a single distressing event or repeated experiences, including childhood adversity, abuse, neglect, or difficult relationships. Its effects can persist long after the circumstances have changed, influencing emotional reactions, physical sensations, beliefs about oneself, and feelings of safety. Therapy can support the processing of traumatic experiences and reduce their ongoing impact.
Anxiety, Depression, and Emotional Regulation: Persistent worry, sadness, irritability, anger, or emotional overwhelm can interfere with daily functioning and quality of life. Counselling helps identify contributing factors, address unhelpful patterns, and develop strategies for managing distress, improving emotional regulation, and restoring a greater sense of balance.
Relationships, Attachments, and Family of Origin: Early family experiences and significant relationships can shape our expectations of closeness, trust, conflict, and emotional security. Exploring these influences can provide insight into how they shape adult relationships, particularly in areas such as boundaries, communication, intimacy, and recurring patterns of conflict.
Life Transitions and Personal Identity: Marriage, parenthood, separation, divorce, career changes, retirement, and aging can reshape familiar roles, relationships, and expectations. These transitions often bring uncertainty, prompting individuals to reconsider their priorities and explore new possibilities. Counselling provides an opportunity to navigate these changes, gain clarity, and make decisions that reflect evolving circumstances and personal values.
Workplace Stress and Interpersonal Challenges: Workplace bullying, conflict, excessive demands, and unhealthy organizational environments can contribute to stress, exhaustion, and diminished confidence. Addressing the personal and emotional impact of these experiences through counselling can help individuals strengthen boundaries, develop assertive communication skills, manage conflict, and make informed decisions about their workplace circumstances.
Grief, Loss, and Bereavement: Grief extends beyond the death of a loved one to include relationship endings, changes in health, and the loss of an anticipated future. Experiences of loss can evoke sadness, anger, guilt, longing, and sometimes conflicting emotions that can be difficult to understand or reconcile. Rather than following a prescribed timeline, the focus is on making sense of these experiences, finding ways to live with loss, and maintaining meaningful connections and a sense of purpose.
Therapeutic Approaches:
My practice draws on several evidence-informed therapies and complementary clinical approaches, including:
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT): An experiential, attachment-based approach that explores emotional experiences and protective responses, helping individuals develop greater emotional awareness and a more secure connection with themselves and others.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): Examines the relationships among thoughts, emotions, and behaviours, providing strategies for addressing unhelpful thinking patterns and developing more effective responses.
Somatic, Neuroscience-Informed, and Hakomi Approaches: Integrate an understanding of nervous-system responses, bodily sensations, and mindfulness to support awareness of emotional and physiological experiences, particularly those that may be difficult to identify or express verbally.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)-Informed and Analytical Approaches: Explore different aspects of the self, including protective responses, internal conflicts, and less-conscious patterns that may influence emotions, decisions, and relationships.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): A structured, evidence-based psychotherapy approach that helps individuals process traumatic memories and other distressing experiences that continue to affect their lives.
Additional training in attachment theory, family systems, mindfulness, and art/play (expressive) therapies contributes to the breadth of my clinical practice.
What Can You Expect From Counselling?
Counselling begins with a conversation about your concerns, what you hope to understand or change, and what you would like to gain from the experience. Together, we establish priorities and periodically review your progress to ensure that our work remains relevant to your needs.
My approach recognizes the connections among emotions, bodily responses, past experiences, and present relationships. Depending on your needs and goals, counselling may involve exploring patterns that contribute to distress, understanding how earlier experiences influence present reactions, and developing new ways of responding to life’s challenges.
Through this process, you may:
1. Gain insight into recurring emotional, behavioural, and relational patterns.
2. Reduce the ongoing effects of trauma and distressing experiences.
3. Strengthen emotional regulation, communication, and personal boundaries.
4. Develop greater self-awareness, confidence, and capacity to make meaningful choices.
Not every difficult feeling needs to be eliminated, nor can every circumstance be changed. Sometimes progress involves understanding an experience differently, responding with greater flexibility, or discovering possibilities that previously seemed unavailable.
To discuss your concerns or arrange a counselling appointment, please contact:
Linda McFalls, Ph.D., LCSW, RSW
Clinical Therapist | Psychotherapist | Clinical Supervisor
Touchstone Counselling Inc.
Office Address:
Suite 222, Rycor Centre
6030 – 88 Street NW
Edmonton, AB T6E 6G4
Phone: 780-996-7655
Email: Linda.McFalls@TouchstoneCounselling.com
In-person and online counselling are both available (South Edmonton). are available.
Direct billing is available through participating extended health benefit providers.
