Family Counseling and Coaching

Family therapy is about working through challenges and conflicts between and among family members. It often addresses issues between children and their parents, siblings, stepparents, or single moms and dads. It also deals with emotional issues between adults and their families of origin often stemming from childhood wounds.
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Family Therapy can Help with Issues, Including:

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• Parenting issues​

• Child and adolescent behavioral & academic challenges

• Divorce and Separation

• Blended family challenges

• Adult mental health, substance abuse & other addictions

• Care of aging parents

• Changes in family life​​​

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​Family therapy requires a delicate balance of insight into, and intervention in the family. I employ a “scaffolding approach” from the bottom up, to identify and subsequently address issues and dysfunction on an individual level as well as systemically. When something affects one family member, it affects every other family member and the whole unit.  

The work requires an understanding of, and compassion for each member’s unique and individual emotional experience.  Critical for its success is that all family members are supported and feel heard, and that everyone experiences the therapy room as a safe place to express feelings.   All need to agree that nothing expressed in therapy is later to be used against any family member.  Through the ventilation of feelings, the real or core issues, often hidden, rise to the surface. 

I facilitate putting plans into place to create lasting change and restore harmony within the family. The process is the same in  blended and single-parent families.  As the process unfolds, I work with different constellations of family members as appropriate.​  I coach not only you, the parents, but also your children - whether latency-aged, pre-teen, adolescents or adults.  Issues involving bullying at school, the use of drugs or alcohol, sexual issues, academic challenges, and issues associated with ADHD, ODD, and OCD  are all part and parcel of what I address with school-aged children and teens.  

Using a whiteboard, I often teach healthy communication skills. “Homework” may be assigned to family members because so much of the change and healing takes place not only during therapy sessions but between them. The process is usually in person but can also be remote. The goals of family therapy are improving communication and solving family conflicts, thus creating healthier relationships and a more loving and peaceful home environment.  I work in person and virtually, with offices in New City, Rockland County, NY, near Woodcliff Lake, NJ, and in Warwick, Orange County, NY, near Greenwood Lake and Monroe, NY.