Family Counseling Service
Counseling For The Entire Family
It isn’t really possible to change a teen without changing the family. You can certainly get a teen started on their emotional journey, but real change is when you change the teen and have them use these tools in a new environment of healthy interactions that are consistent and reliable. This means a teen cannot possibly increase their knowledge and awareness and leave their parent(s) emotionally behind.
Identify Underlying Family Issues
I enjoy working with the entire family because rarely do teens have enough power to affect real change by themselves. When things do change, they do so most effectively from the top down. Challenges like blended families, divorce, single-parenting, or cultural issues can create behaviors that can be misunderstood and create havoc on the family dynamic. Therefore, without changing the parent, we cannot truly change the teen. Ideally, both parents are on board, but even when one parent changes their approach to how they interact with their teen so much can change. Get a free family counseling consultation today!
Schedule a free family counseling consultation to discover the importance of working with a parent and a teen to understand how it is never too late to support changes in your teen.
From the time we are really small, we might dream of what our family will be like. The house, the vacations or the number of kids. What no one tells us is that it takes a lot of work. Sibling rivalry although common is not normal, couples that do not argue are not the perfect example, and just because both parents work, doesn’t mean overscheduling your kid will make up for it.
The holiday or vacation photos can hide disconnection and loneliness and all kinds of unhappiness. What if that photo genuinely portrayed the unconditional love you each had for yourselves and each other?
Family Counseling can Help with
Family connection
Sibling rivalry
Custody issues causing behavioral problems
Feeling understood
Parenting conflict among parents and with children
Generational influences and misunderstandings
It is very hard to make any changes in a family member without working on the entire family. Why? Each member is always doing what they are doing in reaction to the behavior of others. We do not realize this. Because we do not realize that the way I treat you affects how you feel and therefore your behavior we feel people can change independent of what we do. Family is definitely like a glass of water. If you drop ice in then the glass is going to look more full. It looks full, but as anyone who has ever ordered a drink with no ice, the ice gives you less beverage. Glass. Sometimes we can be the ice in someone’s glass that makes them behave in a certain way. We make them feel not good enough or like nothing they do is right because we only say what they do wrong. If we are not aware that this greatly influences how well someone can meet our expectations or even feel motivated to try then we would have no idea we are the ice in their glass influencing so much of their behavior.
This has a huge impact on the family. Each family I help calls me for one kid. It is the target kid and there are several names for this kid who alerts that there is a problem. For me this kid is called Yoda. Why is this kid Yoda? This is the kid that brings the truth of what is happening in the family. They are the ones that cannot lie about what they are feeling and seeing. It affects them so deeply that it prevents their functioning no matter how much they try and act like nothing is happening. This kid also tends to be very methodical and you might even say perfectionistic and this can cause procrastination, avoidance and you guess it, poor grades. Grades are the thing a parent will finally have to call about because it causes teachers to call them.
One person’s behavior causes a domino effect on other people causing the circle of people affected to get bigger and bigger. In which way? If there are other kids in the home who can see what happens when grades drop or when the yoda does avoidant behavior through video games or social media then the other kids learn to avoid not just the yoda, but to be the opposite of the yoda so they do not get in trouble. This makes them appear like they are functioning and that the yoda is the only one with the problem.
This dynamic makes parents feel like they are not the problem, the yoda is the problem. How do you change this when what you see is not what is actually happening. You can start to reverse this process by scheduling a free family counseling consultation.