BreakThrough Counselling
Counselling and Support for Parents in Montreal
In-person in Montreal and online across Quebec and Ontario
RECONNECT WITH YOURSELF
Reclaim clarity, calm, and confidence in your own life, so you feel grounded and more present — both for yourself and in your parenting.
STRENGTHEN COPING AND RESILIENCE
Learn supportive tools to manage stress, overwhelm, and the daily challenges of parenting, helping your home feel more grounded and steady.
Release trauma stored in the body
Reduce tension held from stress and trauma, restoring a sense of safety and calm in your body.
Parenting Comes With Both Deep Care and Real Complexity
Even when you’re trying your best, it can feel overwhelming to juggle your child’s needs, your own emotions, and the constant decisions that come with daily life. Many parents feel stretched thin, uncertain, or alone — especially when challenges build quietly over time.
At BreakThrough Counselling, we provide a space where you can pause, reflect, and gain perspective — supporting you in feeling more centred, confident, and connected to yourself as you navigate the journey of parenting.
Need a Moment for Yourself?
When you’ve spent years putting others first or ignoring your own needs, it’s easy to reach a point where your mind and body start signalling distress. We support people who want to feel better, stronger, and more grounded—but aren’t sure how to get there. This is for you if you are experiencing:
- Feeling overwhelmed by your child’s emotions or behaviours, unsure how to respond without losing yourself?
- Difficulty setting boundaries, saying no, or managing the mental load without guilt?
- Moments of anger, frustration, or shutdown that seem to appear out of nowhere?
- Holding yourself to impossibly high standards. Feeling like you should “handle it better” or be more patient?
- A harsh inner critic that questions your abilities as a parent, even when you’re trying your best?
- Struggling to stay emotionally connected with your child or co-parent when things feel tense or stressful?
- Old memories, fears, or patterns from your own upbringing resurfacing during parenting moments?
- A constant sense of alertness, as if you’re bracing for the next meltdown, conflict, or demand?
At BreakThrough Counselling, we understand how heavy parenting can feel, especially when you’re carrying stress from your past as well as the daily challenges of caring for a child. We offer a space to slow down, understand what’s happening beneath the surface, and reconnect with your strengths.
Support for parents montreal
What Does Support for Parents Look Like?
Support for parents offers a calm, non-judgmental space where you can explore the daily realities of caring for a child: the joy, the overwhelm, and everything in between.
Instead of focusing on what you “should” be doing, this approach helps you understand what’s happening beneath the surface: your emotions, your nervous system, your patterns, and your needs.
We also support you as a whole person—not only as a caregiver.
Many parents reach out because, in the midst of meeting everyone else’s needs, they’ve lost touch with their own. You may be feeling stretched thin, questioning your instincts, or unsure where your own identity fits within the demands of family life. Counselling creates space for you to reconnect with yourself: your values, your limits, your strengths, and the parts of you that may have gone quiet under the weight of responsibility.
Through this process, you can learn to navigate difficult moments with more clarity, strengthen your connection with your child, and meet challenges with steadiness and compassion—for them, and for yourself.
Who Might Benefit from Counselling for Parents?
Parenting counselling is for anyone who feels the weight of caring for a child, whether you’re navigating early childhood, supporting a teenager, co-parenting, or adjusting to a new family dynamic.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, uncertain, or stretched thin, this kind of support can offer a steady place to pause, breathe, and regroup. You don’t need to be in crisis, and you don’t need to feel like anything is “wrong” to benefit. Parenting brings up old patterns, nervous system reactions, and emotional responses that can be hard to make sense of on your own. A trauma-informed and somatic approach creates a compassionate space where you can explore what’s happening inside you, understand your triggers, and develop tools to meet challenging moments with more ease.
The support we offer is personalized to your unique family, your values, and your lived experience. It’s about helping you feel more grounded, confident, and connected so you can move from simply getting through the day to feeling steadier, more supported, and more at home in your role as a parent.
Support for parents montreal
How Counselling Can Support You as a Parent
Navigating Overwhelm and Emotional Stress
Parenting can bring moments of frustration, guilt, or emotional overload. Counselling offers a calm space to slow down, understand what’s happening in your body and mind, and learn tools to respond with more steadiness. You don’t have to carry everything alone.
Managing Difficult Behaviours with Confidence
When a child’s behaviour feels challenging (big emotions, defiance, conflict, or constant tension) it can be hard to know what to do. We help you understand the needs behind the behaviour, explore regulation-based strategies, and find approaches that feel aligned with your family’s values.
Supporting Your Child Through Transitions
Changes like starting school, puberty, blended family dynamics, or shifting routines can affect both you and your child. Counselling provides guidance to help you navigate these transitions with clarity, compassion, and predictability.
Healing Your Own Triggers and Patterns
Sometimes a child’s behaviour activates old wounds, stress responses, or habits that don’t feel like “you.” Through a somatic and trauma-informed lens, we explore where these reactions come from and help you build tools to respond rather than react.
Improving Communication and Connection
If you feel disconnected, misunderstood, or in constant conflict with your child, counselling can help you strengthen emotional safety and rebuild connection. We focus on practical ways to respond with presence, curiosity, and attunement.
Co-Parenting and Family Alignment
Raising a child with another parent or caregiver can bring its own challenges. Counselling supports clearer communication, shared values, and collaborative decision-making, reducing tension and increasing stability for your child.
Honouring Cultural, Historical, and Family Contexts
Every family brings its own stories, traditions, and histories. We work in a culturally responsive way, acknowledging intergenerational influences and supporting you in defining what parenting means for your unique family. This kind of support is not about perfection, it’s about helping you feel more grounded, informed, and connected as you navigate the complexities of raising a child.
Support for You Beyond Your Role as a Caregiver
Parenting can take up so much space that your own needs, identity, and inner world start to fade into the background. This support is about helping you come back to yourself, so you can feel more grounded, more centred in your own identity and more connected to the person you are—not only the parent you try so hard to be.
Support for parents montreal
Modalities We Use
We integrate a range of supportive approaches to help you feel more grounded, confident, and connected in your parenting. Each modality is guided by trauma-informed principles, meaning your emotional safety, comfort, and sense of choice are always at the centre. Together, we explore what best fits your needs, moving at your pace and creating a calm, steady environment for growth.
SOMATIC AWARENESS
Helps you tune into the signals in your body during stressful parenting moments. By noticing tension, overwhelm, or shutdown as they arise, you can respond to your child with greater presence and steadiness.
NERVOUS SYSTEM REGULATION
Offers body-based tools such as grounding, breathwork, and sensory awareness to help you navigate big emotions, yours and your child’s. Regulation skills support clarity and reduce reactivity during challenging moments.
PSYCHOEDUCATION
Provides practical, accessible information about attachment, child development, nervous system responses, and emotional regulation. Understanding how your child’s brain and body work empowers you to meet their needs with confidence.
parts work
Supports you in understanding the different “parts” that show up when you parent, the overwhelmed part, the protective part, the calm part. This approach helps you integrate these experiences and strengthen the part of you that feels aligned with the parent you want to be.
COGNITIVE-BEHAVIOURAL STRATEGIES (CBT)
Used gently and flexibly, CBT tools can help you identify unhelpful thoughts (“I’m failing,” “I should know what to do”) and develop more grounded, compassionate ways of understanding yourself and your child.
MINDFUL PARENTING
Encourages awareness, compassion, and intentionality in your interactions with your child. Mindful parenting practices help you pause, regulate your emotions, and create more responsive, connected moments.
EMOTION-FOCUSED SUPPORT
Helps you explore your emotional experience as a parent including frustration, guilt, fear, or tenderness. By understanding and naming your feelings, you build emotional capacity and resilience.
ATTACHMENT-INFORMED APPROACHES
Focuses on strengthening the emotional bond between you and your child. These approaches support secure attachment by helping you create predictability, responsiveness, and safety in your relationship.
CO-REGULATION PRACTICES
Teaches you how to help your child regulate their emotions by regulating your own. Through warmth, attunement, and presence, you model safety and connection, creating a more harmonious dynamic at home.
Support for parents montreal
What Progress Can Look Like
As you move through counselling, you may begin to notice meaningful shifts in your emotional steadiness, your relationship with your child, and the overall atmosphere in your home.
Positive outcomes can include:
- Reconnecting With Yourself Beyond Caregiving: Rediscover the parts of your identity that may have been overshadowed by responsibility or burnout, so you can show up with more clarity, choice, and inner steadiness.
- Learning to Regulate Your Nervous System: Develop tools to stay calm, steady, and grounded—even during moments that feel overwhelming or emotionally charged.
- Greater Awareness of Triggers: Recognise the moments, behaviours, or tones that activate stress for you, helping you respond with more intention and less overwhelm.
- More Confidence in Your Parenting: Understand the “why” behind your child’s behaviour and your own reactions, reducing doubt and helping you feel more capable and supported.
- Increased Self-Compassion: Release harsh self-judgment and begin to view your parenting through a kinder, more realistic lens, acknowledging that you’re doing your best.
- A Stronger Sense of Safety and Connection at Home: As you gain clarity and emotional steadiness, relationships within your family may begin to feel more predictable, trusting, and connected.
Over time, you may find yourself reconnecting with who you are beyond your role as a parent, approaching parenting with greater clarity, confidence, and warmth.
Step into a life of possibility.
Start your journey to healing with a free 15-minute consultation. Book online or contact us.
Audrey Elkeslassy, MSW, RSW
Founder and Clinical Director
Why Us
BreakThrough Counselling
We believe that true safety starts from within.
When you feel secure in yourself, that sense of safety goes with you wherever you are. But how do you find that inner safety?
You can’t always control your environment, but you can build a solid foundation within yourself. We help you develop a toolkit of resources to strengthen your confidence, self-awareness, and emotional resilience so you can navigate your world with more calm and security.
Every member of our team works from a trauma-informed place and uses what we call a “trauma lens.” This means that we understand how trauma or stress can impact the mind, body, and soul. A trauma lens helps us see how your experiences might influence how you feel, think, and respond today, even if you don’t identify your past as “traumatic.”
Are you ready to shift from surviving to thriving? Book a free 15-minute consultation.
At BreakThrough Counselling, we practice:
Trauma-Informed Care
We use evidence-based methods like EMDR, IFS, and somatic techniques to address and heal the effects of trauma.
Collaboration
We work closely with clients and other professionals to provide holistic, coordinated care that supports effective healing.
Empowerment
Our approach equips clients with tools and strategies to confidently navigate their healing journey and challenges.
BreakThrough Counselling Montreal
Meet Our Counselling Team
Our counsellors offer a compassionate and collaborative space for families to feel heard, understood, and supported.
Our Approach
How Counselling for Parents Works
Our counselling approach helps you slow down, understand what’s really happening beneath the surface, and build steadier ways of navigating challenges. Each session offers space for clarity, nervous system support, and practical tools you can use at home.
1. Understanding Your Experience as a Parent
We begin by exploring what’s bringing you in: stress, overwhelm, conflict, emotional triggers, or simply wanting more confidence and connection.
Together, we look at your family dynamics, communication patterns, and how your nervous system responds in challenging moments.
This helps us understand not just the behaviour you see, but the deeper emotional landscape underneath it.
2. Building Tools for Regulation, Communication & Connection
Counselling/support for parents blends conversational guidance with somatic (body-based) tools.
You’ll learn practical strategies such as:
responding rather than reacting
co-regulation skills to support both you and your child
navigating boundaries with more clarity
calming your nervous system during stressful moments
strengthening communication and emotional attunement
These tools help you show up with more steadiness — even when parenting feels hard.
3. Applying What You Learn at Home
Each session includes simple, realistic practices to try between sessions.
These may involve small shifts in routines, communication styles, or self-regulation habits.
Over time, you’ll start noticing more clarity, less reactivity, and a greater sense of connection with your child. And as things evolve, we adjust the plan together so you always feel supported and grounded in the process.
Support for parents montreal
Questions About Parenting Counselling
Who can benefit from counselling?
Parents and caregivers across all stages — from early childhood to teenage years — can benefit. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, lost, or disconnected from yourself or your children, parenting counselling can help you reconnect, find balance, and build stronger, more confident connections.
How long do the sessions last and how many will I need?
Sessions typically last 50 minutes. The number of sessions varies depending on your goals, some parents come for a few months to work through a specific challenge, while others maintain support longer-term for ongoing growth and resilience.
Is counselling only about managing my child’s behaviour?
Not at all. Parenting counselling isn’t just about your child, it’s about you. We focus on your emotions, stress responses, self-care, and personal growth, helping you reconnect with yourself and build the clarity, confidence, and balance you need in your life.
Can counselling help me when I feel emotionally depleted or “on edge”?
Yes. Part of our approach is helping you notice body-based cues, calm your nervous system, and build tools for self-regulation. This supports both your emotional resilience and your capacity to parent with presence.
Do you offer in-person as well as online counselling?
Yes. We provide flexible options for in-person sessions in Montreal and secure, confidential online counselling for clients who prefer remote support or need more convenience.
Will my counselling be trauma-informed?
Absolutely. BreakThrough Counselling’s parenting work is trauma-informed and somatically grounded, meaning we consider how life experiences, stress, and nervous system patterns influence parenting, and we work with compassion and care.
BreakThrough Counselling Montreal
How To Get Started
Get started with BreakThrough Counselling using the form below. We will schedule you in for a free consultation or answer any questions you have. Our services are available in Montreal with online sessions across Québec and Ontario.
We typically respond within 1 business day.*
*By providing my phone number to BreakThrough Counselling, I agree and acknowledge that BreakThrough Counselling may send text messages to my wireless phone number for any purpose. Message and data rates may apply. Message frequency will vary, and you will be able to Opt-out by replying “STOP”. For more information on how your data will be handled, please visit https://btcounselling.
Book Online
If you’re a new client, you can book a consultation directly online using the button below.
Note: You will be prompted to create a profile in order to book online.