Mark Roussel is a caring and compassionate family man who is a highly-experienced family, and relationship counsellor.
He has offered helpful conversations with couples, individuals, and families for the past 20 years and has experience in many areas including:
Couples Counselling
In relationship counselling it is important to take the risk to honestly face your disappointment and courageously name the changes you want. So identifying the core issues and appropriate goals is the first step to improving your relationship. But perspectives on the problem issues can vary greatly between couples. Couples often find that there are ongoing troubling themes related to dominance or passivity in the relational styles that damage intimacy. There may be patterns of criticism or an over sensitivity to perceived criticism. One person may be dealing with defensiveness or reactive anger of their partner while the other may believe that decisions around money management is the biggest problem. Some might be suffering from unrecognized depression or being impacted by childhood hurts. Others might be having a hard time agreeing with each other when it comes to their shared vision for the future. Whatever the core issues may be, a commitment to courageously face all that’s there is a first step to change and improving things.
How counselling aids in maintaining a better and healthy relationship.
Conflict is inevitable in our marriages or any relationship for that matter. Healthy functioning couples have learnt to agree and disagree in ways that are not destructive to their partnership, but serve to enhance the resiliency of the relationship. Many couples get into unhelpful fixed, predictable patterns of communication that feels cyclic, or recurring. If this is happening in your marriage relationship it is a good idea to seek the guidance of a professional relationship counsellor. With couples counseling you’re able to safely revisit and revise ways of reaching out to and understanding your partner. With effective communication, problems can be dealt with and old, fixed and unhelpful patterns can be discarded.
Relationship Counselling
Relationship counseling not only helps solve couple’s problems but it also helps in bringing happiness and cohesion to the whole family. A healthy marriage or couple partnership is the best context in which children can thrive and grow. In couples counselling you will learn how to interact in a safe, loving and understanding way and this intimate bond modeled to children provides the needed security and belonging so essential for the emotional and psychological well being of children. It sounds simple, but knowing how to model the start and end a caring adult conversation, while being considerate of each other’s feelings, impacts your children in positive meaningful ways for a lifetime.
Going to counseling for the first time can be hard for any individual or couple, especially if you find it hard to share your emotions. Mark Roussel is a highly-trained counsellor who will help you through the process with kindness, understanding and respect.
Marriage Counselling
Married couples are encouraged to seek help to resolve their relationship problems rather than prematurely deciding on separation. Separation and divorce can be devastating for couples and children alike and have a long lasting negative impact. Marriage counselling focuses on healing those unresolved issues and transforming brokenness and sadness into hopeful connection.
Behind much conflict in relationships is our deep longing for intimacy and to know your impact is desired. Only will our needs be met in the context of an intimate caring relationship. We all need to be close to someone. Everywhere people long for closeness to someone. It is healthy and appropriate to desire a deep satisfying and lasting relationship. We should not make apologies for desiring this kind of relationship. It is clear from a casual look at human beings, that we are made for the belonging and security of being truly loved and accepted and also to be of significance to another, to be able to impact that person.
We are deeply personal beings, more than just physical bodies. We are all people who have capacity to love, be purposeful, thinkers, choosers and emotional. If you asked a group of people what they would really desire most of all, in terms of their deepest longings of their hearts, they would most likely say they wanted acceptance, meaning, love, purpose, value, worth. Some of the greatest fears humans have is that they are unable to love or are unlovable, and when it comes to the end of life most people concern themselves with whether they had loving caring relationships and their impact meant something. Most of us when we look inside can put our fingers on a deep desire to love and be loved, to accept and be accepted. When we sense that another person deeply cares for us or when we have compassion for another person something profound is stirred inside us. These are our deepest longings and defines what it means to be human. Marriage and being partnered fulfills core needs not only for love but also to have a sense of being able to influence another, in meaningful ways. To be in a relationship makes people feel there is meaning and in a tangible way experience wholeness and a fullness involved in doing something important that has deep meaning.
Your participation in marriage counselling requires courage and a decision to be willing to be there and offer a commitment to work on the relationship in active ways. Courage to do something to change things is not something that evolves naturally. Our misguided agendas will automatically not yield results. Humans are naturally self-oriented so there needs to be a thoughtful setting aside of demands and a commitment to be centred on your partner’s needs. To take a perspective that, “I will meet her needs first rather than my own”. This requires a selfless choice and courage. It requires a focus on your partner. Most husbands and wives have little awareness of the intense desires in their partners. Too often couples are relating from their self-protective walls, possibly with a mood of, “I can handle this”, “I’m together and have control”, “I’m ok and I assume you’re OK”. Confident smiles often mask deep longings for more connection. We deeply desire to be in relationship with someone who knows us as we are, worried, shattered, scared, angry, lustful, and to be accepted anyway. The goal is to vulnerably show myself. Rather than complain about how bad I feel, I am willing to share deep feelings. To be open and vulnerable and reveal myself in non-demanding ways, sharing what I desire and hoping for a caring response. Again, in marriage counselling courage is required because most people in their vulnerability will be afraid of a response from their partner that may be, indifference, surprise, criticism, or defensiveness. Rather than go self-protective we need to keep moving towards our partner with a disarming, tender courage and continue to speak out of our hearts about our deepest needs.
Some common responses to your partner opening up, may be to, defend, explain, apologize quickly, go on the attack, advise, express distain, or correct them, when what they really need is help to express their feelings and to know that you accept their feelings and can validate what you hear such as reflecting back to them what you hear them saying, gaining clarification, exploring deeper and extending for example, a simple, “I can see that you feel…”
Mark can help you improve your marriage by assisting you and your partner to express your feelings in a safe and respectful manner and help you explore how to respond to your partner when he or she shares their emotions.
Contact us today to book an appointment with Mark at our practice in Joondalup, North of Perth, Western Australia.
Family Counselling Perth
Family counselling seeks to reduce distress and conflict by helping the family system embrace changes that lead to conflict, and assist the family members interact in caring ways to validate each member and value differences rather than see differences and changes as negative. Family counselling does not need all members of the family in the session and may work solely with the parents’. Family counselling works to break down rigid thinking and unhelpful narratives created by the system and validate new healthy narratives about members. Family therapy is about perspective changing, it’s a type of counselling that views the problem as the problem not the person, and see’s the patterns, themes, or systems that need reconceptualizing and renaming. It takes the problem out of the person and externalizes the problem, it provides emancipation from often long held unhelpful critical or dominant narratives. When the problem is removed from residing in the person the person is released from the systems deficit mindset. A strength based focus helps members reframe ideas about themselves and others and challenges mindsets that have been lived out, such as scapegoating and abandonment storylines.
Family thinking acknowledges generational influences on family and individual behavior. In family counselling, generational behaviour patterns such as management of anxiety help people identify current functioning and how that is rooted in previous generations. This encourages ownership of issues, speaking about the self rather than critical putdowns and discussing family dynamics and examples of daily interactions, possibly describing how people interact and react as individuals.
If you’re in Perth and you would like to speak to a family counsellor, contact us today for a free initial consultation.
We also service the following areas around Joondalup:
Burns Beach , Iluka , Ocean Reef , Kinross , Joondalup , Heathridge , Edgewater , Currambine , Carramar , Sinagra , Beldon , Gwelup , Beldon , Mindarie , Quinns Rocks , Jindalee , Butler , Alkimos , Yanchep , Eglinton , Carabooda , Nowergup , Ridgewood , Merriwa , Banksia Grove , Wanneroo , Hocking , Pearsall , Wangara , Madeley , Darch , Balcatta , Stirling , Carine , Trigg , North Beach , Watermans Bay , Sorrento , Duncraig , Landsdale , Gnangara , Ashby , Tapping , Hillarys , Padbury , Kallaroo , Mullaloo , Beldon , Hamersley
