Adult and Child Family Systems, Interrelational, and Symbolic Therapy.

I will work with you individually or with anyone you would like to include.  I have helped adults with a large variety of problems over the years, from anger, divorce, problems with adult children, grief, loss, anxiety, depressed moods, and multiple relationship problems including marriage.

When working with children and adolescents, I require that the family is part of the therapy.   The family is also invited to include anyone who is important in the child or adolescent's life, whom they trust.  This is a wonderful way to help the child or teen not feel 'blamed' or the sole focus of stressed feelings.  Kids often shut down when they feel over focused on.   In addition, the other individuals in the family should not feel 'blamed' in this kind of therapy, because it focuses on relationships of experience.  This means how one experiences something in relationship to others.   Each person often has a completely different experience about others or about how something may have seemed to be communicated to them.   These very personal experiences are not obvious and can unexpectedly remain hidden.  

     Also, when many caring people are part of the therapy, change tends to happen faster and last longer.   This is a basic property of systems therapy (each person in the web of relationships adjusts) rather than asking just one person to adjust.  This has been shown in research studies.

And most important:  The family is where the caring and the deepest strength for change resides.  (Even if you feel completely stuck).  It takes a village to raise a child.

For this reason, whether doing individual or family therapy, I always give attention to and will invite you to include trusted people who are very important to you and/or to your children.    If they cannot be present in the room, they will remain present in the spirit of the sessions.   Our emotional experience is formed around relationships at home, school, work and in the community.   I can even arrange to have someone call in over speakerphone if they are very important to you and you think they can be helpful.    Many studies have show that including others in therapy move therapy ahead much faster.   I see this in my practice and know that when a family comes into together, I will work myself out of a job much more quickly.

I do not pathologize painful emotional experience.

As Harry Stack Sullivan, MD  said; "We are more Human than Otherwise"

Are many.........

Foremost are David Kieth, MD,  Thomas Szasz, MD, Gregory Bateson, PhD, and Carl Whitaker,  MD, in addition to being well read and influenced by many of the other foundational leaders in systems theory, family therapy theory and the wisdom of human experience. 

 I simply require a willingness to for you to be curious about your relationship experiences, as well as your own role in your network of experiences and a willingness to be creative.   These are most difficult parts of  therapy and are foundational to shifting from stuck and damaging patterns in life.