What to Expect from Therapy

Family                  Anxiety             Parenting

Couples              Addiction         Grief

Individual          Trauma             Depression



First and foremost you need to become comfortable in your surrounding and with your therapist. A getting to know you period will happen in the first couple sessions. This is critically important for all involved in therapy. Mental health professionals must be able to gain siome common ground wiith their client to have any success in therapy

During the process we can all learn about things we like, dislike, and our preferences. We are all a very different in how we think, feel, and communicate, and therapy will involves all of those things.

Marriage and family therapy is truely one of life's things that you get out what you put in. Healing is difficult, but true healing requires full disclosure about the things that have harmed us.

 Although we intelectually know the things that have harmed us, a family therapist is skilled in knowing how to help you understand how that has changed you. Marriage and family therapists can work on an individual basis with family members and then slowing reintroduce those family members back into the family therapy, with the hopes of healing the family system.

Therapy is not easy, but the benefits are HUGE

Secrets are what keeps people sick. Keeping an open mind and letting go of expectations is also helpful prior, during, and after your sessions. Marriage and family therapists are professionals commited to helping families and individual family members become able to live with one another with the mental illness getting in the way. Secrets from past harms really do keep us sick both mentally and physically. This creates stress on out bodies due to poor diet, loss of sleep, anxiety, and depression. This syptoms can hbe link to chronic illness.

Look, life is not easy and we all have the scars to prove it. That said, it is the only one we get, so we need to take back the control and take steps in a new direction.

A direction that is towards healing the

past and reinventing ourselves into the person we want to be. As we incoroporate this into opur parenting skills. We will begin to see the dirrerence it makes in the lives of our children.

This will require letting go of ther past and the old thoughts and ideas of who we felt we were. Gone are the days of regrets and unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Grab on to the new, and that can start here and now. I like to ask people, when you get together with family at the holidays do you ever wonder why things go wrong somehow. I then ask them if they 

Reinvent Yourself!

Start building the new person you want to be in all your relationships with family and friends. Fear of the future which causes our anxiety and dwelling in the past which fuels our regrets will soon disapate. Our new healthier way of living will give new and greater meaning in all that we do and say and is part of out therapy aims.

Approach to Therapy

 Functional Family Therapy

Family therapists are trained to identify what is lacking in the family and to help family members understand how their thoughts and actions affect others. The goal is to acheive a family environment that works for everyone even extended family. This is an important aspect for mental health and your overall physical health. But family therapy work in an ongoing process and must be part of the family unit process each day. This family process will also create family resilience over time, so you got to do your homework assignments to build better family systems.

Structural Family Therapy

Here too family therapists must dig in a begin the discovery phase of what are the exsisting family issues. This somethimes requires therapy for individual family members, with a mental health condition. Depending on the circumstatnces family interventions are somethimes required. Remember this is structural family therapy. We are working on rebuilding the family structure and reduce the numbers of family problems.

Interventions

Family interventions are not a common course of action in a family therapy programs, but are used in some severe cases depending on the therapy focuses and the family system. Family members individually can derail the how a family

Family relationships are complicated and need to be nurtured. And that is difficult to do when mental health problems exsit in the family.

Whether those issues are related to marriage, premarriage, family, trauma, addiction, pregnancy or post pardum. Restoring you to good mental health is possible.

Mental illness can also have a phisiological cause from a chemical imbalance in the brain to a hormonal imbalance in the body such as the expirerence many may have after the birth of a child. Postpardum depression can be very serious both for the mother and the child. If untreated it can also turn into chronic physical illness.  Treating mental health issues has never been a one size fits all to me.

Although many of the things that affects each of us can been very similar, their impacts in our lives vary greatly. Abuse, abandonment, addiction, and depression are a some of the downstream affects, of the way we are treated by others. 

Invenidably, those things manifest themselves in who we are as a husband, wife, father, and mother. If treatment is not sought out, we will almost certainly, although unintentionally, allow those old thoughts and feelings to interfere with our ability to being the best version of ourselves to those we care about the most.

A family process can really help the family work through family problems by helping family members. We need to realize the family is in this all together, and one family member can make or break it.

Systemic family therapy

This can help with understanding the dynamics behind complex relationship patterns. Like the example I gave about how we unconsciously take up certain roles when we get together with family during family functions. We are taking up roles that are suited for children and adolecence, which causes stress and conflict, because we are no longer children we are adults.

Again, family therapist are a great resource for family members to learn how to identify situations that create the environment for this to happen to us. Not all family members do this but surprisinly many do fall into family interaction patterns.