Carrie McNeely

BSW, MSW, RCSW

Professional Background

Professionally, Carrie is a fully licensed and registered social worker in the province of British Columbia. She received her Bachelor’s of Social Work (BSW) in 1993 and completed her Master’s of Social Work (MSW) in the fall of 2002. Her thesis (https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0090619) focused on resilience in children of divorce. In addition, she wrote a “clinical examination” in 2006 to certify her qualifications as a registered clinical social worker (RCSW) and professional mental health care provider. These credentials are recognized by many major extended health benefit providers, meaning that the costs of her services may be reimbursed through your place of employment if your insurance package includes counseling.

Standards of Practice

Social workers provide service to individuals, families, groups, and communities adhering to a clearly articulated Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice – both of which can be found on the BCCSW website or can be provided upon request.

Experience

Carrie’s experience includes 5 years pre-BSW work, while holding a para-professional certificate in Human Services, with non profit organizations in the areas of domestic violence, parenting, and brain injuries, as well as running her own daycare. Post BSW experience includes 15 years in the health care system, and encompassed work in the areas of palliative care (working with the terminally ill and their families), trauma care (Intensive Care Unit and Emergency), women’s health (obstetrics, still births, adoptions), physical rehabilitation, and adolescent and adult psychiatry (mental health and addictions). Her final two years in health care were spent as Professional Practice Leader in the discipline of Social Work at Royal Inland Hospital, Kamloops, B.C., providing training, supervision, and program development for the department.

The main focus and passion of Carrie’s work in health care was to assist individuals and families to navigate a variety of life transitions resulting from illness (physical or mental), injury, and trauma, while her studies specialized in the process of family reconfiguration brought about by separation, divorce, remarriage, adoption, and death (to name a few). Thus, she is currently offering both e-therapy and face to face counseling (Kamloops), to individuals and families in transition for any variety of reasons.

Counselling Philosophy

Therapy is provided through a collaborative approach grounded in the premise that the client is the expert of themselves and that Carrie contributes expertise on families and transitions… healing and loss… grief… relationships and communication… perspective and normalizing… listening and goal setting.

She believes it is through this joining… this experience of combining expertise, that we make the journey up the stalk… by learning how to click the heels of the ruby slippers together and find our way “home”.

On a personal note, Carrie is the mother of seven children… three step children and four of her own. Their family is the typical “Brady bunch”, if such a thing exists, except that in addition to the three children each brought to the marriage, they also have a child together. As such, she has personal experience of separation, divorce, blending families, parenting, co-parenting with an x-spouse and step parenting. She has experience of loving addicted individuals through her family of origin, is familiar with 12 step programs and has, undoubtedly, a “spiritual” (though not religious) bent to her professional and personal life philosophies.