Therapy Services Overview

Children, adolescents, and adults with ADD/ADHD and Learning Disabilities often have difficulties with skills like planning, organizing, and strategizing their work consistently to accomplish goals and get tasks done. Psychologists call these skills Executive Functions. The brain’s prefrontal cortex is largely responsible for mobilizing these skills to support success. When these skills are compromised they can topple even the strongest intentions—no matter how smart, curious, or driven you are! On report cards for children and teens, ratings of satisfactory or needs improvement on Learning Skills and Work Habits can signal weak executive functioning skills. In adults, missing deadlines consistently, forgetting to complete chores, or working really hard to keep up with career demands at the expense of all else, can also signal executive functions that are compromised.

At Possibilities, our coaches are licensed health professionals from psychology, psychotherapy, and social work. In coaching, you or your child will work on specific goals with agreed-upon strategies—all with support from a coach who understands the neuroscience of attention, learning, and executive functions. We offer Coaching Programs for children, teens, and adults, scaling our approaches based on age and interests. For example, we offer our Doodle! Do! Done! coaching format for anyone who likes to draw their way through task completion. No matter what format works best for you or your child, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) forms the foundation of our ADHD Coaching Programs—informed by the empirically-based model of ADHD Coaching developed by Dr. Frances Prevatt and Dr. Abigail Levrini—to tackle unhelpful patterns and support meaningful change.

ADD and ADHD affect individual strivings and success; any checklist outlining the core symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorders makes this fact clear. But the profound effects ADD and ADHD can have on relationships is often missing from symptom checklists. Attention Deficit Disorders can strain even the strongest of bonds between family members, loving partners, and cherished friends. Families affected by ADD/ADHD can fall into dysfunctional patterns of expectations and reactions. When that happens, conflicts between partners, siblings, and parents and children can become the norm. That’s when couples and parents often seek therapy—when family distress is enormous or when all hope of reconciliation is gone. At Possibilities, we offer Couples and Family Coaching to help shape expectations and behaviours moving forward—long before dysfunction and distress have swelled to a point of psychological no-return. Our Couples and Family Coaches are licensed social workers who have a deep understanding of family dynamics, emotion regulation, and attachment—and they’ll work with you to strengthen meaningful bonds.

Anywhere we find ourselves—whether at home, work, school, or play—communicating effectively with those around us is critical to our health, happiness, learning, and success. This fact is no different for children. Our ability to understand information—and to be understood—makes the world more predictable and less confusing as we grow. Children who struggle to be understood by others, communicate their ideas, understand information, or use appropriate social skills, could have a speech and/or language delay that can affect their development and well-being. Our Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) uses evidence-based practices to help improve your child’s overall communication skills and provide strategies to target these skills in your child’s everyday environment.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for ADD/ADHD is an effective and proven treatment for adolescents and young adults with Attention Deficit Disorders. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy emerged from scientific findings showing that thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are all connected. Thoughts about who you are and what you can do can influence your mood and actions. When ADD or ADHD makes completing tasks seem impossible—again and again—it’s easy to develop thoughts about yourself that are unhelpful and defeating. When the actions you need to take aren’t very clear either, your mood, thoughts, and actions are affected too. CBT adapted for ADHD—with techniques developed by Dr. Mary Solanto at the NYU School of Medicine, and strategies from the empirically-based model of ADHD intervention developed by Dr. Frances Prevatt and Dr. Abigail Levrini—can help you or your teen counteract the daily effects of attention difficulties. With CBT for ADD/ADHD, you or your teen will learn to challenge unfair and unhelpful thoughts, and develop strategies for breaking down actions into smaller steps for a clearer path to action. Successes will start to accumulate when you or your teen functions more effectively, and changes in esteem, confidence, and actions can follow. Our clinicians also use CBT to treat symptoms of anxiety and depression that can develop in individuals with ADHD. A specialized form of CBT for Obsessive-Compulsive symptoms, and for compulsive hair-pulling and skin-picking disorders, is also offered by our clinicians.

At Possibilities, clinicians offer Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for ADHD, also known as ACT for ADHD. ACT is a mindfulness-based behavioural therapy with evidence to support its effectiveness for people facing a variety of challenges. The acceptance in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy means becoming more realistic about challenges—and what you can do—to help you move forward, rather than being stifled by distorted and unhelpful thoughts that keep you stuck. Commitment means making a plan of action and trying it out. For many people with ADHD, avoiding action or doing things impulsively become habits that are hard to break. Commitment is the opposite of both impulsivity and avoidance, and can develop with clinician support through ACT. Our therapists will help you identify goals, develop an action plan, and commit to achieving outcomes that are most meaningful to you.

Collaborative and Proactive Solutions Therapy (CPS) is a remarkably effective and research proven approach that addresses behavioural issues that often occur together with ADD/ADHD. From this perspective, challenging behaviours happen when the expectations we place on children or teens exceed their abilities to carry out those tasks because of lagging skills. In CPS, parents and children work together to set agreed-upon goals. These goals focus on what children and teens can do—rather than expecting more from them than their current skills allow. By setting fair, mutually agreed-upon goals, children and teens can become less resistant and more likely to complete tasks, while learning new skills along the way. Our psychologists will work with you and your child to help identify strengths, lagging skills, and mismatched expectations. This CPS perspective can help children, adolescents, and their families deal with common challenges such as oppositional behaviour, difficulties with impulsivity, and setting limits for computer and screen time. Collaborative and Proactive Solutions Psychotherapy was developed by Dr. Ross Greene at Harvard Medical School.

Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) is a type of therapy that uses scientific principles to help make meaningful changes in behaviour happen. ABA can be particularly helpful for young children—from 18 months to 12 years of age—who are struggling to control their emotions and behaviours, or who lack the skills they need to meet expectations smoothly and without resistance or tantrums. With ABA, your family works with a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst (BCBA) to help determine 1) what behaviours to target for change, 2) what level of skill your child has in different areas, 3) what factors are keeping specific behaviours going, and 4) what function specific behaviors are serving for your child. With this information, a BCBA will develop an individualized Behaviour Intervention Plan (BIP) for your family with research-driven strategies to build adaptive skills and reduce challenging behaviours. Next, the BCBA can support you—and other adults who play important roles in your child’s life like teachers and school administrators—with administering the plan.