Love isn’t about the grand gestures. It’s about small, everyday moments.
What years of working with couples has taught me: The best gift you can give your children is a happy, loving relationship between you and your partner.
Couple Therapist
Shirley Hung-Truchot is a Canada-trained Counsellor and Couples Therapist with over 10 years of extensive experience in providing individual counselling, couples therapy and perinatal mental health support.
As someone in an intercultural marriage and a mother of two young children, Shirley is passionate about supporting couples who are on the family building journey and raising young children. She helps them communicate more effectively, learn healthier ways to manage conflict, and deepen their intimacy. She also supports those who are healing from affairs as well as navigating intercultural, interfaith relationships. In addition, she works with women who are experiencing fertility challenges, pregnancy loss and postpartum mood issues.
Shirley’s approach to therapy is primarily attachment-based, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive. She practises Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) – an evidence-based, experiential approach effective in working with individuals, couples, and families. Shirley helps couples experiencing relationship distress to break negative patterns, learn to respond, repair, and reconnect emotionally with one another. What sets her apart is her integration of Gottman Therapy and key principles from sex therapy.
Shirley’s style is warm, curious, and supportive. Shirley is committed to creating an empathic and non-judgemental environment in which you can explore your personal challenges and needs. She is mindful of the vulnerability that comes with pursuing therapy, and strives to cultivate a strong therapeutic relationship that is built on trust, respect, and collaboration. She enjoys working with clients from diverse cultural and faith backgrounds, and with various sexual orientations.
Whether you’re single, feeling disconnected in your relationship, or healing from a break up, individual relationship counselling can help you explore your feelings, understand your attachment style, break through unhealthy patterns in past relationships, and develop more meaningful connections with yourself and others.
Couples therapy helps you improve communication, manage conflict, and deepen emotional connection and physical intimacy. It provides a safe space to understand yourself better - what triggers you, how you react and get defensive, how you protect yourself at times of stress and conflict.
Marriage is a beautiful journey that also comes with challenges - especially when couples move through different life stages. Relocating, changing careers, trying to conceive, becoming new parents, raising young children, or caring for aging parents. Even strong couples can struggle during these transitions with more responsibilities and more decisions to be made. Your differences in values and beliefs may surface in ways they haven’t before.
A Couples Intensive is a focused, immersive experience designed for couples who are ready to address their relationship challenges in an accelerated way. With professional guidance, you and your partner will work toward healing, reconnection, and deeper understanding in a warm, safe, and supportive environment.
Many couples come to therapy to be proactive in strengthening and nurturing their relationship. Therapy helps couples improve communication, deepening emotional connection, and navigating life transitions as a team to build a strong, healthy foundation. You don’t have to wait till things become overwhelming or broken to seek help.
Couples come to therapy for many different reasons. Common concerns include communication difficulties, emotional disconnection, recurring conflicts, differences in parenting styles, boundaries with extended family, trust issues, healing after infidelity, fertility challenges, the transition to parenthood, intimacy concerns, and navigating cultural or value differences.
Couples therapy typically starts with an assessment session to get to know each partner, their relationship history and what they’re hoping for from therapy. Subsequent sessions focus on identifying and breaking negative communication patterns, repairing after fights, developing healthier ways of responding to one another, and building consistent relationship tools. Couples therapy is a collaborative, supportive process in a safe space to help each couple build a strong, fulfilling relationship where they feel seen and valued.
The length of therapy varies depending on each couple’s needs and goals. Many couples find that 8–12 weekly sessions provide meaningful and lasting change. Some couples also benefit from a Couples Intensive, which is a more focused and immersive format, with sessions lasting 3–6 hours, allowing for deeper exploration and accelerated progress.
If you’re feeling stuck, disconnected, fighting about the same thing again and again, or struggling to navigate life transitions together, couples therapy can provide a safe and supportive space to break unhealthy patterns, heal from past hurts, and deepen your emotional connection.
While couples therapy is ideal, individual relationship counselling can still be very beneficial. It allows one partner to better understand their own emotions and needs, change unhealthy communication and get more clarity on how to move forward. It is important to work with an individual therapist with a strong relational background with a good understanding of the limitations of working with one partner at a time.
Yes. Many people feel nervous about starting therapy or worry that the therapist will take sides or place blame. A 15‑minute complimentary consultation offers a chance to ask questions, learn about the therapy process, and get a sense of whether working together feels like a good fit. It’s a low‑pressure way to explore your options and take the first step at your own pace.
We integrate two approaches that really resonate with me—and with the couples I work with:
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and the Gottman Therapy Method.
EFT helps couples understand the deeper emotions that drive their predictable negative patterns. The Gottman Method offers practical, research-based tools to improve communication, manage conflict, and strengthen friendship. Our hope is to empower couples to build a relationship where they feel seen and valued.
Rachel Chan Mazariegos
Es un hecho establecido hace demasiado tiempo que un lector se distraerá con el contenido del texto de un sitio mientras que mira su diseño. El punto de usar Lorem Ipsum es que tiene una distribución más o menos normal de las letras, al contrario de usar textos como por ejemplo "Contenido aquí, contenido aquí". Estos textos hacen parecerlo un español que se puede leer. Muchos paquetes de autoedición y editores de páginas web usan el Lorem Ipsum como su texto por defecto, y al hacer una búsqueda de "Lorem Ipsum" va a dar por resultado muchos sitios web que usan este texto si se encuentran en estado de desarrollo. Muchas versiones han evolucionado a través de los años, algunas veces por accidente, otras veces a propósito (por ejemplo insertándole humor y cosas por el estilo).
My daughter had tough time during her first year in secondary school as she moved to a new school during covid-19 period. Lack of friends in a totally new environment and facing new curriculum requirements, she was very depressed. School counsellor recommended Rachel Chan Masariegos to us. Rachel has been very patient and caring with my daughter. I am very happy to see my daughter has regained her self confidence and has improved a lot in controlling her emotion with help from Rachel. I think what Rachel taught my daughter will be a life time gift for her.
Dr. Rachel is very caring, and tried her best to support our schedule/needs. She is easy to connect and is able to quickly build trusting relationship with my son. I highly recommend Dr. Rachel Chan and the clinic.
We have been seeing Rachel Chan Mazariegos for several months, making excellent progress. From our very first consultation, there was a connection which has laid the foundation for an open and progressive relationship with both our child and us. Highly recommend Rachel and the OT&P MindWorx Clinic.
We were referred to Rachel Chan Mazariegos by our GP to assist with some challenges our daughter was faced with. We found Rachel to be extremely patient and understanding, immediate connection with our daughter and provided useful tools and creative solutions. Highly recommend.
We were referred to Rachel Chan Mazariegos by our son's doctor. We were very impressed by her level of professionalism and experience. She wrote a 30-page thorough report on our son's strength and weakness, and made good suggestions on how to better support him. We have to admit that she identified problems which we had long ignored or taken for granted! Following her recommendations, our son starts to see Marianne, the speech therapist at OT&P MindWorx to improve his reading comprehension, and Rachel herself to improve his social skills, while we follow their strategies to work with our son at home. It's only been a couple of sessions, we have already seen him making pleasant progress :)
The clinic is conveniently located in Central. The staff is friendly too. Highly recommended.
From the first meeting, Rachel was able to provide us with clarity surrounding the issues our son was facing, giving him much needed support and relief for all concerned. She was able to equip our son with the skills and techniques to help him through some particularly challenging times and he's now a much stronger and confident individual and our family is in a much happier place
We had the pleasure of meeting with Rachel Chan Mazariegos at MindWorX for a consultation regarding our child’s well being, and it was very insightful. Rachel gave us some great tips on how to help him with his learning and day-to-day.
We also signed our helper up for the Caring for Children workshop, which Rachel leads. It is tailored towards helpers in Hong Kong, so they can “share their experiences, gain knowledge and learn techniques to manage behaviours as well as learn how to improve relations with the children they are entrusted with”. Our helper found it very inspiring, enlightening and useful. She kept thanking us for this opportunity to join the workshop, and that she was awarded a certificate that will be helpful to get employment in the future. We noticed the positive changes right away, with how she’s feeling more confident and her overall mood and attitude have improved. Thank you, Rachel!
I met with Dr. Rachel Chan and found the advice given by her very valuable, relevant and useful. The staff were always courteous and efficient and are conveniently located at Central. I would recommend their services highly.
Rachel is very professional to provide the comprehensive assessment report after her school observation. She also gave us a lot of classroom & home based recommendations in order to help my child can better integrate into his school life.
Rachel is super. I love her non intrusive ABA style. She has the natural hearts and talents for ASD children and is very experienced. Rachel can also do school visit and offers valuable advise to teachers. I also like it when Rachel will try challenging my son a bit to work slightly above his level. The clinic is also very nice, calm and relaxing. Staff is very friendly as well.
A warm, friendly and highly professional centre. Rachel is a wonderful therapist - passionate, patient and creative in her approach. Additionally, all the staff we have encountered here have been so caring and supportive toward our son whenever he attends. Highly recommend.
Shirley Hung‑Truchot
Couple Therapist