Because we only get one chance to get it right
Family Therapy
Strengthen Your Family and Support Your Child’s Growth
Every family faces tough moments, but when a child is struggling with behavioral challenges, it can feel overwhelming. Whether your child is refusing to go to school, showing signs of technology or screen addiction, or becoming increasingly disrespectful at home, you don’t have to handle it alone.
Family therapy provides a safe, supportive space to rebuild connection, set healthy boundaries, and create lasting change.
How Family Therapy Helps
Understand the Root Causes: A licensed family therapist works with parents and children to uncover the underlying emotions and triggers behind challenging behaviors.
Improve Communication: Learn proven strategies to reduce conflict, listen effectively, and help your child feel heard.
Set Healthy Limits Around Technology: Develop practical plans to manage screen time and reduce technology addiction while encouraging positive habits.
Support School Success: Address school refusal by identifying anxiety, stress, or academic pressures and creating a step-by-step plan for regular attendance.
Guidance for Parents
As a parent, it’s natural to feel frustrated or unsure how to respond when your child is disrespectful, defiant, or withdrawn. In therapy, you’ll gain tools to:
Establish clear expectations and consistent routines.
Encourage cooperation without power struggles.
Strengthen your relationship through empathy and positive reinforcement.
Begin Your Family’s Healing Journey
With compassionate support, your family can overcome these challenges and create a calmer, more connected home.
If your child is experiencing behavioral issues, technology addiction, school avoidance, or disrespectful behavior, family therapy can help you move forward together.
What being stuck in a non-relational family may look like.
”A lack of relational connection within a family can mean that there is a lack of depth, communication, or emotional connection which can lead to mental health challenges, conflict and resentment”
Emotionally Unavailable Families
A relationship that lacks emotional connection may appear okay on the surface, but there is no real depth. Signs include not feeling understood, not talking about important things and walking on eggshells around certain family members.
Poor Family Communications
You might feel like family members don’t listen or understand you. Family members will go out of their way to avoid contact to avoid conflict and push down feelings and needs.
One-sided Family Relationships
A relationship where one family member runs the house and they can feel if they take their foot of the gas family system will fail. This also can include one sided parenting of children. This can lead to feelings of resentment and exhaustion.
The Unbalanced Family
You might feel drained, stressed, or dissatisfied after spending time with a family member. You might also feel like you are doing all the work, physically and emotionally which makes your blood boil. This can also feel like you are being held hostage by a family members behaviors and attitudes.
Unhealthy Relationships within Families
A relationship where one family member uses strategies to achieve their own goals and needs, often at the expense of the other party. This can include power imbalances, manipulation, and putting your own feelings on the backburner.
Transactional Relationships within Families
A relationship that is more self-serving and short-term, with the goal of getting something with minimal effort.
Untrusting Families
A relationship where there is no emotional connection, communication breakdown, or you don't trust a particular family member because of their past behaviors.
Being relational with family members means that connections are reciprocal, rewarding, respected and rooted. They are about trust, communication with each member feeling heard and seen. A home should be a place of safety, peace and love not an environment where there is conflict, trauma, disrespect, chaos and drama.
PLEASE NOTE I DO NOT ACCEPTS INSURANCE FOR FAMILY THERAPY.
PRIVATE PAY RATE IS $225 PER 50 MINUTE SESSION.
My 4 Simple Step Approach to Family Therapy
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Connecting and Relating
The first step in family therapy is meeting with the parents without the children to get their side of the story and what they are seeing and what they believe the challenges are. Then I meet with the children by themselves to get their perspective about what the challenges are at home.
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Getting to the Root of the Problem
The second step in my family therapy process is getting to the root of the problem by meeting with all family members. A lot of times I see parents that believe their child is the problem. When typically that is just a symptom of another problem happening withing the family dynamic. The child is trying to tell their parents that something is not right in their world and they don't have the words so their behavior is how they express themselves.
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Plan for Change
The third step is checking in with each family member to establish goals about what their family would look like if things were better. Then we develop a plan for each family member on what they are going to work on to make the family system more connected and happier. So they can eliminate the drama and start enjoying each other.
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Reflect and Refine
In this final step we work each week and reflect upon what has changed, what is working and what is not working. Then we make minor changes, adjustments and refine our behaviors until we find a path forward to your families happily ever after.
I have extensive experience working with families, children and teenagers. I have found that therapy only works when the family participates. My approach is simple.
Family therapy is the fastest and most efficient way to remediate family problems and dysfunctional patterns. Especially if you are a parent and struggling with a child you characterize as “out of control”. If you have a child that is angry, oppositional defiant, explosive, verbally and physically aggressive towards themselves, their parents and others, this is a child who has a story to tell and doesn’t have the resources to tell it so they act it out. I have spent the last several years working with children with these challenges as well as children with ADHD and ADD. A high percentage of children I see have what is called, Reactive Attachment Disorder which is a loss of connection to their primary caregiver due to their needs not being met at some point in their lives.
An angry child is one that feels unsafe and that is at the root of their anger Their anger is a message to the adults in their lives that they don’t feel safe and my job as a family therapist is to help the parents discover what they need to do to make their child feel safe so the unexpected behaviors can be reduced and eliminated. I have so many parents come to me and tell me that they are losing hope for their child due to the child’s behavior and they are stressed out and feel as though they are drowning and have tried everything and nothing works. “We took away all of their technology” and “It doesn’t matter what we take away, they say they don’t care” and the behavior continues. The reason the behavior is continuing is because you are not getting the message they are trying to send to you and that is where family therapy comes in.
My family work starts with the parents to get a better understand what the child is experiencing in the way that the parents interact with each other. Reactive, stressed out, anxious and depressed parents will certainly have a child that has behavior challenges especially if their relationship with each other is saturated with dysfunction. “ignoring a misbehaving child sometimes only sends a message to them that you don’t care”. A angry child that is looking for attention, knows what they want and not getting it they way they need it. The next step in the family therapy process is bringing the children in and having them talk about what is bothering them and provide them a safe space to talk about what is not right in their world. The next step is we starting doing the work by helping the parents address any relationship challenges that they may be experiencing and then work with the child very slowly on helping them understand that things are going to be changing and they are being heard and seen.
Every family session is healing in some ways and in most sessions a parent will say “I had no idea they felt that way” and the reason why is our culture and lives are so busy and we are so busy multitasking a million things our families get caught up in it and what is the most important thing in life? The ultimate family therapy goal is to help the family system change and assist each family member with reconnecting to each other so all family members are heard and seen no matter how young they are.
Our goal as a positive parenting role model is to model the behavior we want our children to adopt and there is nothing wrong with getting a little help and support to achieve this because don’t they deserve it?