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San Diego Family Therapy

Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing.

– Jim Rohn

Home is Where the Heart Is

We all have an inherent need for connection and validation from our family relationships. As children or adolescents, we look to our family to provide us with a safe haven where we can experience a sense of comfort, closeness, acceptance, understanding, and support. We want to feel valued, important, and loved unconditionally, through both rewarding and challenging moments. As parents, we strive to provide protection, love, and guidance to ensure that our children grow to be caring and responsible.

This need for a secure attachment bond is an innate survival mechanism that wires human beings across the life span to seek and maintain close, meaningful relationships. When children and adolescents feel that they can depend on their parents to be accessible and responsive to their needs, they are better able to be autonomous, confident, and adaptive to their environment. Individuals within an emotionally connected family are better able to risk, learn, and respond to the needs of others.

How Family Therapy Can Help You

Family therapy can be beneficial in healing, enriching, and revitalizing your relationships with the people you love most. Whether your family is experiencing negative interaction dynamics, difficulty engaging cooperation, emotional disconnection, or adjusting to a new change, therapy can help restore family bonds and create more satisfying shared moments.

Family therapy can also be tremendously valuable throughout the process of divorce in helping parents refocus their relationship on what is best for their children, including coordinating schedules, maintaining consistency and stability, and learning respectful conflict resolution skills. During such a devastating time, cooperative co-parenting increases the sense of security that children feel as they transition to a new way of life.

I utilize Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT), a short-term, highly effective approach aimed at guiding families in better understanding and resolving the patterns of negative interaction that they are feeling stuck in. Through this method, I collaborate with parents in learning new, effective ways of expressing their intentions of love and care for their children. In conjunction, I empower children and teens to develop positive and constructive ways of asserting their needs with their parents for comfort and connection, while also guiding them to build more openness and honesty in this relationship. The overall goal is to restructure the interaction patterns within the family dynamic to promote a more secure and fulfilling bond.

Goals I Can Help Your Family to Achieve

  • Openly express thoughts, feelings, and needs in positive, constructive ways
  • Enhance your understanding of each other
  • Better relate to one another
  • Learn to connect and repair during times of difficulty
  • Set appropriate boundaries and expectations
  • Engage cooperation
  • Clarify family roles and rules
  • Develop a collaborative co-parenting relationship
  • Gain insight into your emotional responsiveness

I empower parents, children, and adolescents to achieve greater happiness and deeper connectivity. For more information and to schedule a free 15 minute phone consultation, contact me today!