PSYCHOLOGY & COUNSELLING

Contact Laila Presotto
 604 849 0034
lailapresotto@yahoo.ca

Laila Presotto

Laila Presotto holds an M.A. in Counselling Psychology and is a Registered Clinical Counsellor. She works as a Psychotherapist in private practice with individuals, families, couples, children and youth. Laila is a Developmentalist - in that she seeks to understand and address the root problem in children and adults to further understand their behaviours. She believes it’s important to understand the antecedents (what happened before) in order to make sense of what’s moving a person to behave and act in certain ways. She sees behaviours as a symptom of something deeper and believes if we gain a deeper insight into ourselves and our issues, we then have the potential to do differently in our lives. In a nutshell, she helps people see differently so they’ll do differently!

Laila is a Certified Gottman Couples Therapist. Dr. John Gottman, a leading research scientist on marriage and family with over 25 years of landmark research, is the author of several books including “The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work” & “And Baby Makes Three”. Laila uses this method when working with couples to help them turn their relationship problems around and create strong, lasting unions. The goal of the method is to help couples break through barriers to achieve greater understanding, connection and intimacy in their relationships. It helps couples learn how to work through potentially destructive problems and how to detect the most common stumbling blocks of a relationship and most importantly, how to avoid them. Their intervention strategies are based upon data from Dr. Gottman’s study of more than 3000 couples.

Laila is a Certified Trauma Therapist, trained in Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing Psychobiological Trauma Resolution Therapy Program, designed for professionals to help individuals who have experienced trauma in their lives. Dr. Levine described trauma as “an internal straitjacket created when a devastating moment is frozen in time. It stifles the unfolding of our being, and strangles our attempts to move forward with our lives. It disconnects us from our selves, others, nature and spirit. When overwhelmed by threat, we are frozen in fear, as though our instinctive survival energies were all dressed up with no place to go.” Trauma symptoms are not caused by the event itself. They arise when residual energy from the experience is not discharged from the body. This energy remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and minds. We can lose the capacity to cope in healthy ways and become less resilient. The Somatic Experiencing approach offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the FIGHT, FLIGHT OR FREEZE responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these physiological states. Dr. Peter Levine is the author of many books including “In An Unspoken Voice: How The Body Releases Trauma” and “Waking The Tiger: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences”.

Laila is the author of a thesis called “Domestic Violence and Its Effects on Young Males: Is There a Risk for Criminal Behaviour”. Her expertise is domestic violence and the impact it has on children. She’s particularly interested in the externalizing and internalizing problems in children who witness domestic violence. Externalizing problems (acting out behaviours) include conduct behaviours, aggression and criminality. Internalizing problems, which are emotional or affective problems include anxiety/withdrawal, nightmares, lower self-esteem and psychosomatic complaints. She has also worked with young males aged 11 to 18 years old in a maximum-security facility to understand the impact their early life experiences had on their emotional and psychological development. She works with parents and professionals to help them identify the early warning signs of potential “budding criminals” throughout childhood.

Laila is a Certified Dr. Gordon Neufeld Course Educator whose passion and enthusiasm for the material shows in her commitment to helping parents and professionals understand the children in their lives from the inside out. She’s certified in 10 of Dr. Neufeld’s DVD courses and facilitates several of these courses with small groups year round. These courses include: Power To Parent Series- The Vital Connection, Helping Children Grow Up, Common Childhood Challenges; Making Sense of Adolescence; Making Sense of Anxiety In Children & Youth; Making Sense Of Aggression; Bullies: Their Making & Unmaking; Making Sense Of Counterwill; Making Sense OF Discipline; Alpha Children: Reclaiming Our Rightful Place In Their Lives. In addition, she offers individual parenting consulting sessions in her private practice. Laila also offers parenting through separation/divorce to help them understand their children’s emotional and psychological needs during this transition. Helping parents understand what they are seeing in their children or what to expect to see allows them to respond in ways helpful and supportive of their children’s developmental process.

Laila has an extensive mental health background. She worked 10 years with Vancouver Coastal Health’s Mental Health & Addiction team as a Psychotherapist treating adults with various mental health issues. Previous to that, she worked in more of a psychiatric setting, supporting those with chronic and persistent mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia, Bi-Polar Disorder, Clinical Depression, and Anxiety Disorders. She’s been trained extensively in CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), which in a nutshell explores how peoples thoughts, effect their feelings, which effects their behaviour and what they do. She has facilitated many psycho-educational/therapy groups to support adults going through periods of increased stress and/or depression and anxiety.