Family Counseling & Therapy
Learn to Create the Open, Understanding, Supportive, and Loving Relationships Your Family Desires and Deserves
As humans, we’re all relational beings. To a large extent, our relationships define how we see ourselves and who we are.
Unfortunately, just as easily as our relationships can be the source of our greatest joys, they can also cause incredible heartache and pain. And this is especially true of our relationships with family members.
When one member of a family is suffering from an issue, you can be assured it’s affecting the whole family.
If a child is having difficulties, you can be sure it’s impacting the parents …
If one parent is suffering, you can be just as sure it’s affecting that parent’s spouse and the children …
This is just as true when a grown child is having issues with his or her parents or his or her partner’s parents.
While teen counseling, child therapy, or individual counseling and therapy for the adults is often the best way for each family member to better understand themselves and how their own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors contribute to the family dynamic, there are definitely times when family counseling and therapy can help play a vital role in a family’s communication, healing, and growth.
Why Family Counseling and Therapy?
Whether your family is experiencing a major transition or upheaval – such as a separation or divorce, a death, a re-marriage, grown children returning to the nest, or adult children who are now taking care of aging parents – or your family could simply benefit from improving and refining their communication skills with one another, family counseling is a way for multiple family members to learn how to better express their thoughts and feelings and work TOGETHER.
Just as importantly, if not more so, since our emotional wounds occur in our relationships with others, it takes loving, understanding, nurturing, and supportive relationships to heal those relational wounds.
In other words, relationship wounds that have occurred in a family are an opportunity for that family to heal and grow, which is what family counseling and therapy are all about!
Family counseling and therapy provides a safe and contained environment for every member of your family to not just to vent their frustrations and develop better communication skills, but to become more aware of each other’s desires, concerns, and needs, and heal and grow … together.
Our role as professional family counselors and licensed therapists is to help you do just that!
How Family Counseling and Therapy Can Help You
As an inclusive group of counselors and psychotherapists that help a wide range of clients with a variety of issues, the family counseling and therapy services we provide at Mindful Practices can take a variety of forms that are tailored to each family’s unique personality and needs …
Our family therapists incorporate a wide variety of healing techniques, from Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy – an evidence-based psychotherapy that helps people heal by accessing and healing their protective and wounded inner parts – to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to mindfulness therapy, from play therapy to motivational interviewing, to name but a few.
But more than this …
Since the trusting, healing relationship you create with your therapist may well be the most important ingredient in your family’s healing, the fact that Mindful Practices is a group practice means that one of our specialists is likely a great fit for helping your family achieve its goals!
That all being said, whichever therapist you choose to work with will start by helping you assess the issues your family is facing.
Your therapist and family will then work together so that every member of the family better understands why each other behaves the way they do, as well as decide the best ways to open the lines of communication and improve mutual respect and trust.
While the majority of sessions will be conducted with all of the family members involved being present, your therapist may also decide to spend some time with each family member individually in order to understand their experiences and perspectives on the issues they’re facing and then conduct sessions with the whole family in order to facilitate communication between each family member.
Conducting individual and family sessions allows our therapists to understand the underlying causes of the problems your family is dealing with, as well as help each individual family member communicate more effectively to avoid misunderstandings, frustration, hurt feelings, and alienation.
Regardless of the particular structure your work together takes, the goal of family counseling is for each family member to better understand each other’s personalities and behaviors and determine the “why” of what is happening.
Once we know why certain problems are occurring, we can explore communication styles, develop plans for changing unhelpful behaviors, and work towards increasing mutual trust and respect so your family can grow and flourish.
Ready to Get Started?
No matter how big or small the issues may be, family counseling and therapy can be a wonderful way for a family to explore problems, work together on developing solutions, and better connect and relate to each other as individuals, which can help make sure every member of the family can heal and feel supported and loved.
So, if you’re ready to explore your family’s interactions, communication styles, and dynamics, so that all of the members of your family can heal and grow together, contact us today to ask any questions you have and schedule a free, 15-minute, initial phone consultation. We look forward to speaking with you and helping your family create the respectful and loving relationships you desire and deserve!