Family therapy for intact, divorced, or blended families
Families can be a source of love, connection, and support, and they can also be a source of stress, grief, and frustration. This makes sense because families consist of a collection of humans with ever-changing needs, desires, communication styles, and experiences in the world. And, all of those factors can lead to tension, misunderstanding, and conflict.
Our goal in family therapy is to provide your family with a supportive and nonjudgmental space to explore your family dynamics, relationships, and emotional/communicative patterns. We work with all family structures – intact families (consisting of parent/s and their children), divorced families, and blended families (consisting of new/additional caregivers and/or children).
Family Therapy is a therapeutic process in which part of or the entire family participates, rather than working individually with each family member. Our therapists work together with the family system (all of the family members together) to identify primary concerns and determine therapeutic goals and approaches. Common concerns addressed in Family Therapy include:
- Challenges with communication styles/patterns
- Behavior patterns
- (Co)parenting
- Changing needs amongst family members (physical and mental health, educational needs, etc.)
- Navigating family transitions (like divorce, moving, or job changes)
- Supporting LGBTQIA2+ identifying family members
- Grief and loss
- Traumatic experiences
Parenting skills and support
Parenting can be a rewarding and challenging experience. Challenges in parenthood are normal and expected, but you do not have to go through it without support. We find that the best success in working with our child clients comes when we partner with parents to be agents of change themselves. Therapy is most effective in children when we are able to provide parallel support to the parents/support system of the child. Our goal is to help parents navigate challenges as they arise and work to support better understanding of their child’s behaviors and needs. In doing so, we provide the most comprehensive care to both the child and the entire family unit.
How therapy can help
Parenting brings with it a number of role and identity changes. In addition to working with parents to address their child’s challenges, behaviors, and needs, we also serve to support you as a parent. We provide a caring and safe environment to explore your unique experience as a parent and to support you in becoming the parent you want to be. This may include developing insight and understanding as to how your own attachment histories directly impact how you parent. We partner with you to support your psychological health and wellness in order to promote success in meeting your parenting goals.
In addition to providing parenting support, there are other modalities and assessment tools that we may utilize in parenting work with our families. This includes therapeutic approaches that involve both the parent and child such as Theraplay ® and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy.
Theraplay® Techniques
Theraplay® is an attachment-based treatment focused on enhancing the parent-child relationship through play-based, developmentally appropriate activities. The goals of Theraplay® treatment are to enhance the parent-child attachment, improve self-esteem, and achieve joyful engagement. The Theraplay® Institute refers to this therapeutic approach as “building relationships from the inside out.” You can learn even more about Theraplay® here.
Why us?
Our practice adopts a collaborative approach, which means years of experience in integrating parents into the therapeutic process with children. Many of our clinicians have completed Level One training of Theraplay® and include Theraplay® techniques in their work with children and families.
