Family Therapy and Marriage Counseling

Family and couple therapy focuses on changing interactions among people so as to alleviate the underlying presenting issue. Family therapy is actively focused on problem solving approaches related to improving the quality of interactions, reducing burdens and improving family function.

Although family therapy ideally involves as many family members as possible, family therapy may be conducted with a single individual. Whether working with an individual, a couple or a family unit, I look at the family system, as well as the community, school, or work systems, to determine ways to help clients improve their lives.

Information from the family will be gathered to represent the family relationships and the background and quality of those relationships. In ongoing sessions, we will understand how the system of interactions in the immediate family and in past generations may contribute to the issues they are presently working on.

At the beginning of treatment, the identified challenges become the focus of intervention: naming the problem, goal structuring, role structuring, role reverberations, and individual self-care.  Engaging family members by systematically addressing the processes that the family must address.

Often, one of the most frustrating things within a family or a couple is that a person is not responding to “all the things the other/s is/are offering”. What might be happening is that a person may be receiving everything except what he or she wants. Therefore, helping to understand each other’s needs may help us provide what the other wants, in the way the other person wants to receive it.