About Brenden, MA RCC

Brenden Taylor, 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. 

Currently Brenden is especially excited about offering his services to couples in an intensive format. These are four to six-hour sessions during which couples are supported to safely dive deeply into the underlying causes of discontentment in their relationship, and to 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. 

Whether working with Brenden intensively or in individual couples sessions, Brenden’s approach combines both psycho-therapeutic and psycho-educational components. This means at times therapy will be the focus in the session and may include uncovering and sharing feelings, clarifying beliefs and values, and recognizing unhealthy patterns. Other times education will be the focus in the session, meaning learning new concepts and frameworks, practicing skills, and debriefing application of skills and concepts from outside of sessions. These two approaches are necessary in order to unpack and process existing challenges, while also growing and evolving the relationship by adding new insights and abilities.

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. 

Focuses:

• Communication
• Emotional attunement
• Infidelity and rebuilding trust
• Power struggles
• Road-mapping for the future
• Desire and intimacy
• Codependency
• Attachment styles
• Parenting

More about Brenden

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.

Brenden is Co-Founder and Director of NeurAlive alongside his beloved wife, Elinor Taylor.