Family Counseling

Develop strategies to break down walls and build healthy connections

Is your family going through a rough patch? Whether the issue itself, stems from a lack of understanding between those involved, sibling conflict, or developmental disagreements with a child, a difficult situation can have an effect on the entire family. Family counseling can be helpful when problems arise and can help restore and improve communication.

Situations that Benefit from Family Counseling:

  • Parental conflicts with children, teens, or young adults.
  • Co-parenting issues.
  • Issues between parents such as separation and divorce.
  • Adjustment to new living conditions due to parent separation.
  • Isolation and disconnecting
  • Substance use.
  • Defiance and disrespect.
  • Sibling conflict.
  • Engaging in Destructive behaviors
  • Change in personality or behavior

How can family counseling help?

Family counseling can help open up a line of dialogue and communication and can help family members understand each other’s perspectives. This makes it easier to resolve disputes. During the counseling sessions, each member has the ability to learn ways of communicating better, as well as developing techniques to de-escalate arguments while making sure that everybody is getting heard. This can also help with parenting problems such as conflicting parenting styles, rule enforcement, and remaining consistent with your child once the rules are established.

 

How is it accomplished?

The goal is to improve relationships and improve methods of communication and conflict resolution. Families are a unique ecosystem, and issues affecting one member of a family can reverberate and affect the whole unit. Additional benefits of this type of counseling are that in some instances, the sessions can heal emotional wounds in a short period of time. My approach includes collecting information from the teen and parent during the initial consultation and mutually deciding the appropriate path of counseling.

My approach to family therapy is rooted in Attachment-Based Family Therapy and Schema Therapy

ABFT is an evidence-based therapy that addresses problematic parent-child relationship dynamics that contribute to adolescent and young adult “internalizing disorders” (e.g., depression, suicide, trauma, anxiety). ABFT emerged from interpersonal theories and “is a trust-based, emotion-focused psychotherapy model that aims to repair interpersonal ruptures and rebuild an emotionally protective, secure-based parent-child relationship.”

ST is an evidence-based therapy that addresses how early maladaptive schemas (problematic life patterns) and modes (behavior that emerges when schemas are triggered) lead to conflict in marital and other family relationships. By addressing “mode clashes” and underlying unmet core needs that contribute to schemas and modes, family members can reduce conflict and improve the quality of their relationships.