Family Counseling

I work with families who find themselves in trouble.

Dinner in your rooms with your own screens every night? Daughter who only communicates with a sneer and a request for something expensive and guaranteed to go out of style in a week or less? Issues with your kids, and differences in parenting styles interfering with your marriage? Family Counseling can help you understand your family patterns and improve them. You can learn to talk to each-other again. You can even learn to want to talk to each-other again. You can have good relationships with your children even as they push every-single-button. It’s not your fault. You weren’t given a manual. This is not about blame. This is about systems. Like any system, a family seeks to maintain balance. This is difficult with so many moving parts. Especially in a family, when each “moving part” has its own opinions, feelings and desires. (And that’s not even taking into account the raging hormones!) Family therapy helps get all the parts working together. Be gentle with yourself, and contact me today to discuss whether therapy is right for you and your family.

Support for Parents of Teens

You may wake up one morning stunned to discover that after all the hard work and love you put into raising your child–the reward is a stormy, rebellious, or otherwise difficult teenage child who seems to hate you. I work with couples* struggling with those difficult teenage years. I help couples in turmoil over their teenager, learn how to communicate more effectively with each other, which makes the disagreements manageable. And lets you be able enjoy the good times together. The couples I work with are troubled by the effect parenting is having on their relationship with each other.

You and your partner desire to be on the same page with each other but can’t seem to get there. (He thinks everything is fine, but you are loosing your mind. You think he/she needs more discipline and he thinks a buddy approach is best.)
You sometimes feel like a failure, and wonder what you could have done differently.
You wonder if there is hope, or is this the new reality.
Instead of dealing directly with the other aspects of your relationship, you focus only on your teenager.

I help couples improve their communication with their partner so that they can be happier together AND work together on parenting their teen.

I coach couples on effective communication with their child.
I counsel couples on individual and marital issues that arise as we do the work with their child.
I take turns talking to each family member alone, as a couple and as a unit. (All of this happens as necessary and is determined by the therapist and the family.

WHAT TO HOPE FOR

By the end of our work together your teenager might still be difficult, but you will have a much better perspective on what this means, and doesn’t mean (It doesn’t mean you have failed as a parent or that something has gone horribly wrong) and you will feel more equipped to deal with it. By the end of our work together you may feel:

More connected to your partner and more love and compassion for yourselves and your child.
More peaceful within yourselves and your home
Renewed sense of joy and hope for your family.

* Please know that while I do work primarily with couples, I also welcome and work with single parents, who may be co-parenting with an ex-partner, or parenting alone. If only one person in a couple is willing to come in that is fine too. It only takes one person to change a family for the better.