Family Therapy
Are Stress And Strain Negatively Impacting Your Family?
Is there a situation or stressor in your life affecting every member of your family?
Are you having difficulty maintaining strong, healthy bonds due to disagreements, tension, and differing personalities?
Could you benefit from having a safe space outside of your home to come together and work on your communication and problem-solving skills?
Family dynamics are often tough to navigate. No matter how much love or positive intention is present, it can be difficult to balance everyone’s needs at home. This doesn’t necessarily get easier with time, which is why therapy can benefit any family at any stage of life.
What Is Your Family’s Experience?
If you’re a parent with children at home, you may be grappling with a range of stressors affecting your family. Maybe a recent death or divorce has shattered your lives, and everyone is processing the grief in their own individual—and perhaps incompatible—ways. Maybe addiction, substance abuse, mental health issues, or other concerning behaviors are contributing to unhealthy dynamics, taking up everyone’s attention and energy and leaving little room for joyous, positive time together.
It's also possible that your family is undergoing a new transition, whether you are introducing new family members into the mix or dealing with life’s usual growing pains. You may be in the difficult position of caring for aging or sick relatives, though you, your parents, children, and/or siblings all have different ideas of how to move forward. And if your family has always struggled to get on the same page, you may be interested in attending family therapy with aging parents and/or adult siblings.
Our therapists specialize in counseling approaches that are effective and family-specific. Working together, we will create a supportive environment where each of you can feel seen and heard on the path to renewed connection and harmony.
Have any questions? Send us a message!
All Families Have Their Own Unique Obstacles To Navigate
Though family can be a tremendous source of joy and support in one’s life, none of us are born with innate skills for healthy relationships—we have to learn them. When we grow up in environments that were chaotic, inconsistent, or unsafe (whether emotionally or physically), we tend to adopt unhealthy patterns and behaviors to get our needs met. Even if we had strong relationship models growing up, common stressors like finances, divorce, mental health struggles, and a death in the family can easily upend a sense of stability.
Families are also the areas of our lives where we experience the most shoulds—“Children should obey their elders,” “Family should always come first,” “I should be doing more for my parent/sibling/child”—making it hard to assert ourselves or try to get our needs met as individuals. This kind of pressure can apply in any familial role, and over time, it can become difficult to parse the messages we receive from society and in our upbringing from what we really want when it comes to maintaining strong connections. This can be especially true in the case of blended families.
Conflict and compromise are important touchstones for any relationship, and fortunately, you can learn tools for both in therapy. Working with our therapists, your family can meaningfully learn to overcome conflict and miscommunication as you develop a new understanding of yourselves and each other.
Family Therapy Can Be The Gateway To Stronger Connections
At Jessica Bolden Psychotherapy Group, we have many therapists on staff who specialize in family counseling. We work with families at any stage of life—both immediate and extended—to navigate relational issues and reach a consensus that works for everyone.
Before the counseling process begins, your therapist will gather information about your family and the specific conflicts you want to overcome in therapy. This process is designed to honor each family member’s unique experience while also facilitating a treatment plan that makes sense for everyone. Once a treatment plan is in place, our goal is to equip you with the tools and understanding needed to feel seen, heard, and empowered, both in your familial roles and as individuals.
We draw from relational therapies and skills-based interventions to help clients create healthy attachments. Oftentimes, we use the therapy space to clarify values, helping clients to interpret what they’ve been taught they should do versus what they really want. Parenting skills are also helpful in some cases, especially for clients with young children, and we have therapists trained in Parent Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) for families where behavioral issues are present.
Even if your relationships feel strained and helpless now, they can get better. With the help and support of therapy, your family can heal and grow together as you implement life-changing skills for communicating, parenting, boundary-setting, and problem-solving.
Common Concerns About Family Therapy…
I’m worried a therapist will side with one member of the family.
Our approach to family and couples counseling is not about being right; it’s about getting it right. A therapist’s role is not to take sides; it’s to teach each client skills for active listening, effective self-reflection, and healthy attachment. We are invested in healing the rifts between you, not widening them.
Our family will have to be in counseling for a long time before we see progress.
When families have been struggling for months or years, it can feel like problems are too entrenched for progress to even be possible. However, the whole point of therapy is to teach clients new ways of relating to one another so they can let go of unhealthy patterns as quickly as possible.
It might also help to know that family therapy is usually one of the shorter, more solution-focused formats for counseling. In fact, many of our families are able to resolve presenting issues in 12 sessions or less.
Therapy is too expensive.
Our practice is committed to providing accessible, effective mental healthcare to families of all backgrounds and budgets. We have many clinicians on staff who offer either affordable or sliding scale rates. Contact us for more information.
Healed, Mutually Supportive Relationships Are Possible
At Jessica Bolden Psychotherapy Group, we work with parents, children, siblings, and extended family members in counseling to overcome conflict and promote healthy bonding. Contact us for more information.