Marggie is a Registered Social Worker with the Alberta College of Social Workers. She holds a bachelor’s degree in social work (BSW) from the University of Calgary and a master’s degree in social work (MSW) with a Trauma-Informed Practice Specialization from the University of Calgary. Marggie also has a Bachelor of International Relations with a minor in Finance from the Universidad Externado de Colombia.

Throughout her career as a therapist, Marggie has supported clients of all ages, including children, adolescents, and parents facing crises and various physical and emotional well-being challenges, such as anxiety, depression, and trauma. She is adept at case management and has ample project management experience, including project coordination for the Telehealth network across the Nunavut Territory.

Marggie is professionally fluent in English and Spanish. She offers counselling in both languages.

Marggie’s unwavering optimism and ability to have and transmit hope are grounded in experience. The opportunity to respond to clients with empathy and culturally safe ways, provide advocacy, and connect clients to various community-based resources has shown Marggie how receiving adequate, essential support when facing crisis, loss, bereavement, and disabilities can change lives. Counselling support can transform what the future looks and feels like for children, teens, parents, and entire families.

Her experience counselling teens includes facilitating Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) skills groups for adolescents and offering brief counselling to adolescents admitted to a psychiatric unit and their parents. She also has ample experience planning and delivering programming to children and adults to promote physical literacy through a strengths-based approach and conveying gentle feedback and guidance to junior coaches and coaches in training.

Instead of focusing on labels and diagnoses when counselling children and adolescents, Marggie focuses on their strengths. She is adept at using the Collaborative & Proactive Solutions (CPS) model of care to connect and collaborate with her young clients. She helps each child or teen to identify the problem affecting their life and to develop the skills they need to solve it.

Equipped with the skills they need to do well, such as “how to control our behaviour,” “how to regulate our emotions,” “how to communicate our needs,” “how to think flexibly,” and “how to get along with others,” they can sustain self-directed appropriate behaviour. In other words, they can and will do wonderfully well.

“Kids do well if they can.
If they aren’t doing well, it means there’s a barrier between effort and success that must be addressed.”

—Dr. Ross Greene

Marggie’s counselling experience also includes coaching and mentoring parents using behavioural strategies, such as Triple P Positive Parenting, and developing a therapy plan customized to the unique needs of each family.

Since childhood, Marggie wanted to change the world in wonderful ways. Over time, she realized that significant change at a large, international scale begins at home, in the smallest system: the family. To start, she focused her warm heart on loving her family. Then she developed her professional capacity to help people give the love they have and share it within their own families, relationships, and communities.

Infusing her interventions with empathy, playfulness, and curiosity, Marggie draws from multiple trauma-informed, attachment-based therapy techniques and approaches to help children and adolescents. She looks forward to creating a safe space for your child or teen to open up, connect, heal, grow, and thrive.

Child and teen counselling can change your child or teenager’s world in wonderful ways. And when it does, how you experience the world—both as a parent and as an individual—will change too.

Marggie has a special place in her heart for parents who are grieving and can support you through the immensely difficult process of grief and loss. She has experience planning and facilitating support groups for bereaved individuals and couples experiencing pregnancy and infant loss.