Family Counseling and Coaching

What is Family Therapy?

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 sometimes 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, regardless of the nature of the conflicts, and that everyone experiences the therapy room as a safe place to express feelings.   All need to understand and 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, which are sometimes hidden or disguised, rise to the surface. 

I facilitate putting plans into place to effect lasting change and restore harmony within the family. The issues are sometimes complex in blended and single-parent families but the process is the same.  Just as with couples - where I may see each spouse separately and/or together as a couple at different times - I alternate working with different constellations of family members based on the circumstances.

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Being a parent is probably the most challenging, and yet ultimately rewarding job there is.  Not only do we have our own lives as husbands and wives together with our relationships with our own parents, but now we also have the complexities of helping our kids (and ourselves) navigate through the many developmental phases of childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. 

As your family counselor and coach, 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 work with in my work with school-aged children and teens.  

I teach communication skills often using a whiteboard. “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, solving family conflicts, thus creating healthier relationships and a more loving and peaceful home environment.