About Brenden Taylor, MA RCC
Registered Clinical Counsellor
Brenden is both NeurAlive’s Clinical Director and a Registered Clinical Counsellor dedicated to helping couples overcome their challenges and restore a sense of joy, trust and intimacy to their relationship. He also champions supporting couples in their roles as parents.
Couples Counselling: Managing our intimate relationships to ensure they are healthy, attuned, and capable of growth is perhaps one of the most important investments we can make. However, none of us is provided with the ultimate “How-To” book to ensure we are tending to ourselves and our loved ones in this way. This is where couples counselling can help. Brenden provides relationship-specific support for couples struggling in various areas, including communication, emotional attunement, infidelity, trust building, power struggles, and planning for the future.
Brenden’s approach combines both psychotherapeutic and psychoeducational components. This means that at times, therapy will focus on uncovering and sharing feelings, clarifying beliefs and values, and recognizing unhealthy patterns. At other times, education will be the focus, involving learning new concepts and frameworks, practicing skills, and debriefing the application of skills and concepts outside of sessions. These two approaches are necessary to unpack and process existing challenges while also growing and evolving the relationship by adding new insights and abilities.
Couples Intensives: Sometimes, a one-hour couples session doesn’t quite feel sufficient to make headway with some of the core challenges you’re facing. To support couples who wish to delve deeper into their relationship struggles without the time restrictions of shorter sessions, Brenden offers an intensive format. These four- to six-hour sessions are designed specifically to help couples safely dive deeper into the underlying causes of discontentment in their relationship and begin developing a foundation of skills for communication, healing, and connecting in day-to-day life. These intensives can be followed by individual sessions on a weekly basis or as needed.
Individual Client Sessions for Relationship Support: It is not uncommon for individuals to want to work on themselves with the intention of helping their relationship. Brenden provides individual counselling sessions for those who wish to explore their beliefs and behaviours in relationships and create the changes that will allow them to be a better version of themselves for their partner. Areas to explore can include family of origin, attachment tendencies, personality, motivations toward or away from certain behaviours, and skill-building such as effective communication, managing conflict, building trust, and expressing boundaries in healthy ways. Oftentimes, following the end of a relationship can be an important time to reflect on what you’ve learned – what worked, what didn’t, what needs to change – and to do a personal “update” so you are a more consciously evolved version of yourself for the next relationship.
Parenting: Similar to what couples face, we are not provided a “How-To” booklet when we become parents. Helping a child develop a strong and secure attachment, fostering an understanding of love and respect, and supporting healthy identity development are all key aspects of effective parenting. Working with your child’s nervous system, building their autonomy, encouraging a love of learning, and teaching responsibility and accountability are within reach, but at times may need further clarifying and support to be enacted well, particularly as your child grows through different ages and stages of their development.
Additionally, it is the parents who are willing to explore themselves and how they learned to be a parent – and who are open to making necessary changes for the betterment of the relationship – who are going to find this type of counselling a fruitful endeavour. Whether you’re seeking help with early years parenting or with a child who is an adolescent or young adult, Brenden will tailor his sessions to ensure you’re working on the specific areas of your parent-child relationship that require attention.
Young Adults & Self-Discovery: Who am I? What are my passions? Where do I belong? Who do I want to be? These are very important questions that often naturally arise as we grow and develop. However, they can also create anxiety and a sense of hopelessness if not given a useful direction to channel energy toward. Brenden spent many years exploring and crafting his own identity through examining his past, seeking to understand his beliefs, and becoming more attuned to who and what he brings into his life, and what he keeps out. We are constantly in a state of being and becoming. All of these factors play into who we are and we can consciously take the reins of our lives and create the life we would love to live. Every moment is a chance to learn and evolve, and Brenden supports his clients to create clear intention for themselves, to prioritize what brings them joy and happiness, to forge a belief in themselves, and to commit to viewing difficulties or ‘failures’ as opportunities for growth. These are some of the key approaches that can make all the difference in how we carry ourselves into our future.
Approaches: CBT, Attachment, Parenting, and Couples Therapy using PREP (Prevention & Relationship Education Program).
Populations: Adults, Parents and Couples.
Specializations: Relationship Challenges, Parenting, Emotional Regulation Struggles, Communication Difficulties, Life Transitions, Self-Discovery and Isolation and Loneliness.
Work & Educational Background: Brenden’s educational background includes specialized training in Relationship Counselling from the University of Denver, in addition to a Bachelor’s degree in Education and a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Child & Youth Care from the University of Victoria. Such education gives Brenden a keen sense of how our early childhood development impacts us as adults in relationships, which is often necessary to explore to varying degrees in the therapeutic process. Moreover, Brenden is well-equipped to help parents connect with their children of all ages, and to guide their optimal development. Brenden is Co-Founder and Director of NeurAlive alongside his beloved wife, Elinor Taylor.
Personal Background: Born in Perth, Australia, Brenden moved frequently with his family, living in several Southeast Asian countries as a child and throughout his 20s including Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Christmas Island. Living a transient life resulted in a lot of soul-searching, self-discovery, and seeking answers to the larger questions in life, such as: What is my purpose? What is the meaning of life? Where can I find a true sense of belonging? How can people become the greatest version of themselves? Throughout his travels, Brenden both witnessed and experienced relationships with people of many different cultural backgrounds, taking note of the impact that cultural and personal belief systems have on the ways in which people relate to their significant other. He developed a keen interest and curiosity in why some relationships work and why others don’t, and began searching for the catalyst. These explorations, coupled with his training and direct experience, have equipped Brenden with the observation skills to sharply hone in on any dynamics at play in a relationship. This is followed by his ability to gently but confidently guide couples towards the life they envision together.
