Individual virtual psychotherapy across Ontario
Therapy for your own wellbeing when someone you love is struggling
Loving someone with significant mental health needs can bring vigilance, grief, guilt, anger and exhaustion. Individual therapy can focus on how the situation is affecting you without making you responsible for treating or changing the person you love.
The focus
This therapy is for the family member seeking support
The focus is your distress, choices, relationships and health. Therapy may help you work with guilt and grief, understand recurring interactions, communicate more clearly and establish limits that make care more sustainable. It is not treatment for the absent loved one or family therapy.
Mental illness can reorganize the life of an entire family
You may monitor another person's mood, respond to crises, coordinate care or carry responsibilities that other people do not see. You may feel protective and angry, hopeful and exhausted, sometimes in the same day. Stigma and concern for the other person's privacy can make it difficult to speak honestly about your own experience.
You do not need to stop loving someone before taking the effect on you seriously.
What we may work on
Depending on what you need, individual therapy may include:
- recognizing caregiver strain, chronic vigilance and self-neglect;
- making room for grief, anger, fear and conflicting loyalties;
- separating compassion from responsibility for another adult's choices;
- communicating needs and limits more clearly;
- responding to intense interactions without automatically rescuing, attacking or disappearing;
- rebuilding relationships, health and interests that have narrowed around the crisis.
The goal is not emotional distance. Often it is to find a form of involvement that respects both the person you love and your own limits.
Floyd's perspective
Floyd's practice is informed by lived family experience with anxiety, ADHD, autism and BPD. For four years, he has also co-led skills programs for families affected by BPD through the Ottawa Network for Borderline Personality Disorder.
Those experiences inform his understanding of family strain, but they do not make two families the same. Therapy begins with your particular relationships, responsibilities, culture, safety and goals.
What this service is not
This is individual psychotherapy for the person attending. It is not treatment for the loved one who is absent, a way to diagnose them, family therapy or the Family Connections program. Floyd's volunteer and advisory roles are separate from his psychotherapy practice.
If there is immediate danger, active violence or a suicide crisis, psychotherapy appointments are not emergency services. Call 911 when there is immediate danger. In Canada, call or text 9-8-8 when you or someone you know is thinking about suicide.
Related reading
Review status
Prepared carefully before publication.
Floyd Kelly developed this page from his clinical approach, lived family experience and four years co-leading family skills programs. The page describes individual psychotherapy only. Final author and CRPO advertising review remain pending.
Scope: Pending · Author: Pending · Advertising: Pending
A first conversation
Your experience can have a place of its own.
A free 15-minute consultation lets you describe what support you need and determine whether individual therapy with Floyd fits your situation.