Is your family struggling?
Do you have a challenging child or teenager?
Do you have a child that is angry and acting out verbally and physically?
Do you have a child that has ADHD?
Is your child’s behavior become problematic?
Do you have a co-parent that is not responsive?
Do you feel like you are living a parenting nightmare?

I have extensive experience working with families, children and teenagers. I have found that therapy only works when the family participates. My approach is simple.

Family therapy is the fastest and most efficient way to remediate family problems and dysfunctional patterns. Especially if you are a parent and struggling with a child you characterize as “out of control”. If you have a child that is angry, oppositional defiant, explosive, verbally and physically aggressive towards themselves, their parents and others, this is a child who has a story to tell and doesn’t have the resources to tell it so they act it out. I have spent the last several years working with children with these challenges as well as children with ADHD and ADD. A high percentage of children I see have what is called, Reactive Attachment Disorder which is a loss of connection to their primary caregiver due to their needs not being met at some point in their lives.

An angry child is one that feels unsafe and that is at the root of their anger Their anger is a message to the adults in their lives that they don’t feel safe and my job as a family therapist is to help the parents discover what they need to do to make their child feel safe so the unexpected behaviors can be reduced and eliminated. I have so many parents come to me and tell me that they are losing hope for their child due to the child’s behavior and they are stressed out and feel as though they are drowning and have tried everything and nothing works. “We took away all of their technology” and “It doesn’t matter what we take away, they say they don’t care” and the behavior continues. The reason the behavior is continuing is because you are not getting the message they are trying to send to you and that is where family therapy comes in.

My family work starts with the parents to get a better understand what the child is experiencing in the way that the parents interact with each other. Reactive, stressed out, anxious and depressed parents will certainly have a child that has behavior challenges especially if their relationship with each other is saturated with dysfunction. “ignoring a misbehaving child sometimes only sends a message to them that you don’t care”. A angry child that is looking for attention, knows what they want and not getting it they way they need it. The next step in the family therapy process is bringing the children in and having them talk about what is bothering them and provide them a safe space to talk about what is not right in their world. The next step is we starting doing the work by helping the parents address any relationship challenges that they may be experiencing and then work with the child very slowly on helping them understand that things are going to be changing and they are being heard and seen.

Every family session is healing in some ways and in most sessions a parent will say “I had no idea they felt that way” and the reason why is our culture and lives are so busy and we are so busy multitasking a million things our families get caught up in it and what is the most important thing in life? The ultimate family therapy goal is to help the family system change and assist each family member with reconnecting to each other so all family members are heard and seen no matter how young they are.

Our goal as a positive parenting role model is to model the behavior we want our children to adopt. Yelling at them when they are yelling is not positive parenting. Also most parent’s egos prevent them from being the parent their children need and this results in the parents need to be relevant in ever aspect of their child’s lives which can result in trying to control our children instead of providing them the autonomy they need to grow into the person they are supposed to become! So it is relevant to become irrelevant and a parents goal should be to raise our children so they don’t need us which will allow them to develop the skills to be resilient, survive and thrive into adulthood.