Our Services
Supporting Individuals, Families and Professionals
We offer a range of services designed to build connection, develop skills, and create positive change. All services are available face-to-face and online, tailored to meet your specific needs.
01 For Individuals and Couples
Individual Consultations
We all want relationships built on trust, love and acceptance. To do this we have to first develop self-empathy. As we learn to understand our own emotions and recognise our needs, our empathy for the feelings and needs of others in our lives will grow, leading to greater understanding and connection.
Individual consultations provide a safe space to:
Explore your feelings and needs
Understand patterns in your relationships
Develop communication skills
Work through challenges with support
Counselling for Men
Petar offers specialised counselling for men, with particular focus on supporting men who have experienced childhood trauma including sexual abuse, as well as mental health and addiction challenges. Drawing on both his professional expertise and his own lived experience of childhood sexual abuse, Petar brings deep understanding and compassion to this work. His relational, approachable style creates a safe space for men to process their experiences, develop healthy connections in their relationships, and find pathways forward toward healing and hope.
02 For Families
Authentic Communication Programme (No Fault Zone Game)
If you're longing for genuine connection and healthy, loving relationships in your family, we can help. The No Fault Zone Game is a fun, non-confrontational way to understand one another better and shift from managing behaviour through blame and punishment toward mutual respect and collaboration.
Identify unhealthy patterns of communication and gain skills to connect on a deeper level, with each family member feeling valued and appreciated. Create a strong, loving foundation for your family now and for generations to come.
Circle of Security Parenting
At times all parents feel lost or without a clue about what our child might need from us. The Circle of Security® is a relationship-based early intervention programme designed to enhance connection between parents and children.
Decades of research confirm that secure children have increased empathy, greater self-esteem, better relationships, enhanced school readiness, and increased capacity to handle emotions effectively.
Using the Circle of Security Parenting™ (COSP) model, our trained facilitator works with whānau to:
Understand their child's emotional world by learning to read emotional needs
Support their child's ability to successfully manage emotions
Enhance development of self-esteem
Honour the innate wisdom and desire for children to be secure
Coaching and Mentoring
Sometimes what's needed isn't therapy or supervision, but someone alongside you to help you think things through, set direction, and build confidence in your own decisions. We offer coaching and mentoring for individuals and professionals wanting support to navigate change, develop in their role, or work through a specific challenge — grounded in the same relational, strengths-based approach that underpins everything we do.
03 For Professionals
Clinical Supervision
Sandra provides professional supervision for social workers and allied health practitioners. With specialised training (Wheel of Supervision Parts 1 & 2) and Associate Membership of the Australian Association of Supervision, Sandra offers individual and group supervision, reflective practice support, and professional development guidance.
Sandra deeply values the importance of the supervision relationship and the need to provide a safe, supportive space where supervisees have the freedom to openly express themselves, bringing their whole self into the supervision room. Supervision is the supervisee's space — a place to be empathically listened to without judgement, to raise difficult times, celebrate success, reflect, and grow in confidence both professionally and personally.
Her supervision approach is underpinned by authenticity, integrity, accountability, empowerment, social justice, cultural awareness, safe practice, and a commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Sandra also enjoys exploring the challenges of integrating theory into practice, team dynamics, management systems and structures, assessment, attachment theory, problem-solving, and acute and complex casework.
Skills Development Training
We provide training to teach social workers, counsellors, and health service providers how to use the No Fault Zone Game with their clients, teaching skills of:
Recognising and understanding emotions
Communicating clearly with compassion
Connecting meaningfully with others
Resolving conflict with empathy
Transforming unhealthy generational patterns of communication
Building Understanding: Workshops for Professionals and Families
We offer specialised workshops focused on helping professionals and families understand each other's perspectives and work together more effectively, addressing:
Communication barriers between families and services
Partnership and collaborative decision-making
Understanding lived experience
Creating dignity and choice within service relationships
How we work together
Understanding
Every conversation begins with listening. We take time to understand your experiences, your hopes, and what has brought you here. There is no judgement, only curiosity and respect.
Explore
Together we'll explore what is happening beneath the surface. By understanding feelings, needs, and patterns of communication, we can begin to see new possibilities.
Build
Using practical tools, lived experience, and professional knowledge, we'll work alongside you to strengthen relationships, build confidence, and create meaningful change.
Grow
Real change takes time. Whether we're supporting individuals, whānau, or professionals, our aim is to help you leave with practical skills and greater confidence that continue well beyond our time together.
Our Approach
Bridging Lived Experience and Professional Practice
Everything we offer is shaped by two things: decades of professional training, and a lifetime of lived experience as parents navigating disability, physical health, mental health, education, and social services systems.
We believe:
Families are partners, not problems to be managed.
Professionals are often only in a family’s life for a moment in time — yet families live a lifetime with the decisions made in that moment. Real partnership brings together professional expertise, family expertise, and, wherever possible, the voice of the person the decisions are actually about. Each perspective matters. Listening has to go both ways — professionals to families, families to professionals — so decisions are made with people, not about them.Empathy opens the door to change.
Blame and shame keep people stuck — we've felt that ourselves. Understanding what someone is really feeling and needing, instead of judging them for it, is what allows real change to happen.Dignity includes the freedom to try.
Real progress means being willing to try different things, even when some of them don't work. Growth happens through trial, error, and grace — for families and for professionals alike.Connection comes before correction.
Before we can problem-solve together, people need to feel heard and understood.Lived experience is a form of expertise.
Professionals work best when they honour and learn from the lived experience of the people they support. Lived experience is a person’s reality — held closely to their heart — and it's when this meets professional knowledge that a depth of understanding emerges that neither could reach alone.
We work gently, honestly, and practically, always aiming to build genuine connection and offer useful, usable tools for the people we walk alongside.
CONTACT
Sandra Druskovich
Email: sandra@authenticcommunication.org.nz
Phone: 027 248 1010
Petar Druskovich
Email: petar@authenticcommunication.org.nz
Phone: 021 248 1007
GET IN TOUCH
We'd love to hear your story and explore how we can work together.
