We work with families who want to find more connection but may need help facilitating difficult conversations. We often see adult families who would like to work through old painful patterns of communicating that have gotten them disconnected and stuck. We have a lot of success helping adult children navigate with their parents or with a sibling.
The clear path of Emotionally Focused Family Therapy gives families the tools to communicate more effectively and get coaching, support, and direction on how to be vulnerable and stay vulnerable. First, we help you to find out what your deeper emotions are (often hidden underneath anger, resentment, annoyance, or just freezing up). Once we have become clear what those more vulnerable feelings are – like hurt, upset from the past, fear of disappointing, etc, we help you to share them in a safe way with your family member.
This tends to create the freedom you need to clean up the past and form a new kind of relationship that is healthier and emotionally safer. This kind of work can graduate all parties involved into more mature and loving relationships.
For younger families, we help the parents get on track first. Often a handful of sessions with the parents can get us on the same page with shared goals in terms of parenting strategies and getting a hold of any difficult patterns in which the couple is struggling. We then bring in individual children or teens to work with the parents and other siblings.
The flow of the family therapy is dynamic, the sessions go back and forth between different dyads, parent and child, child and sibling, parent and parent, and then the whole family. We want to make sure we have a hold of all the moving parts and are healing each relationship as we go towards healing the whole system.
Emotionally Focused Family Therapy and Family Systems Theory are great ways that help families become whole again. Our hands-on approach always strives to help your family feel safe and gently coached in how to best communicate and be vulnerable. Our constant and underlying theme as we figure out content issues together, is to practice ways of sharing that facilitate closeness and understanding rather than disconnection and frustration.
