Individual & Family Counseling

Everyone has a bad day, a bad month, or a bad year.  We’re all human, and sometimes we need a supportive helping hand.
When it comes to therapy, I tend to approach my interventions in a collaborative and humanistic way.  I fundamentally believe that all people are ultimately good, but that sometimes we need to connect authentically with another person who can validate and empathize with our life stories.

Individuals

We all know that the “noise of life” can sometimes grow from a quiet murmur to an overwhelming roar, where it’s nearly impossible for a person to see trends and understand patterns because of the cacophony of sound.  As a therapist, I believe my primary job is to act as a “sounding board” for my clients.  Clients are encouraged to bounce their issues and concerns off that “sounding board” in order to eventually raise their self-awareness, recognize patterns and co-create solutions.  I have found that many of my clients hold most of their own answers, but they require a sensitive, objective and trained professional that can help them put those answers together in order to “see the forest for the trees.”

Individual Therapy is helpful for a myriad of goals including: increasing happiness, overcoming a difficulty, clarifying root issues that are leading to relational discord, improving self-esteem and much, much more. Each therapeutic encounter can look very different depending on what a client is asking for.

Why do people come to therapy?

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Some people come to therapy to grow

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Some come to fix something

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Some come to learn something about themselves

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Some come for support

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Some come for a good listener

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Some come for authentic reflection

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Some come for hope, and

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Some come to find meaning…

Whatever your reason might be, I am available to offer unconditional acceptance and support.  When the “noise of life” gets a bit overwhelming, a helping hand can be just the thing to turn the “noise” into “music” again.

Families

Families are complicated constructs and our modern times have only added to this complexity.  Dual income, transient, traveling-for-work families that have to deal with peer-pressure, social media avalanches, and celebrity-dictated self image are something that our parents could never have dreamed of.  Life has become more complicated than ever in the last 20 years and family life has changed with it, for better or for worse.
My marriage and family therapy training gives me a systemic way in which to understand and interpret the chaos that today’s families experience, which means I see families as interconnected systems.  One part of the system cannot change without affecting another part of the system; the trick is understanding all the different moving parts.  Family Therapy is an effective intervention for any type of therapeutic goal and has shown to be effective with goals ranging from increasing trust and open communication to helping a family to overcome mental health concerns or behavioral disruptions.

I provide a setting where I can help families to talk about the issues that most people don’t know how to talk about. Often families need help not only in solving an issue, but also in talking openly about that issue so they can better support one another.  I can help your family talk about a variety of subjects in a way that allows family members to feel protected from judgment and / or defensiveness, including:

  • the death of a loved one
  • divorce
  • becoming a teenager or entering the teen years
  • sexual or gender orientation
  • impacted trust
  • a family member’s anxiety
  • depression

I help the family to understand the ways in which family structure, family dynamics and family communication patterns each affect the presenting problem.  Like any complex system, a family is the sum of multiple layers, all of which must be understood independently in order to make the holistic system function in a better way.

There is not a “one size fits all’ way for families to interact with one another; every family system is different.  With that in mind, I can help to isolate the specific needs of all the individuals in a family and help the family relate with one another in a way that satisfies the needs of each individual as well as the family as a whole.

Once this is accomplished, the need for a therapist is generally reduced. The goal of Family Therapy is to get families to help themselves so they’re not dependant on an external person to resolve their conflicts.  It IS possible to have a harmonious, happy and well-adjusted family life… it sometimes just takes a little bit of work.