Family Therapy
Healing the patterns that move through families and generations.
Families are systems. What one person carries, everyone feels. What goes unspoken in one generation often surfaces in the next. And the patterns that hold a family together can be the same ones keeping certain members stuck.
Family therapy is a space to look at all of that, together.
What brings families here
Families arrive for all kinds of reasons. A child or adolescent who is struggling. A rupture that has fractured communication. Grief that has landed differently on different members. Conflict that keeps cycling without resolution. A transition, divorce, remarriage, relocation, illness, hat has asked more of the family than it currently has the tools to meet.
Sometimes families come because one person has been identified as the problem. Often, the work reveals that the difficulty belongs to the system, to the patterns, the roles, the unspoken rules that have organized family life, sometimes across generations.
A systems and experiential approach
My training in family therapy is grounded in the systems tradition, with roots in the Ackerman Institute for the Family, one of the oldest and most respected family therapy training centers in the world. The Ackerman approach understands the family as a living system: interconnected, patterned, shaped by history and context, and capable of genuine change.
This means the work focuses on the relationships and dynamics between family members, not on fixing any one individual. It asks: what are the patterns here? What roles has each person taken on? What has been passed down, often without words? What does this family need in order to move differently?
But systems work alone is not enough. I bring an experiential dimension to this, which means we work with what's alive in the room. The tension that rises in a particular moment. The way a family falls into its pattern right here, between us. The emotions that surface when something is finally named. Insight matters. Feeling it shift matters more.
What this work can address
Parent-child conflict & communication: recurring tension, disconnection, or difficulty reaching each other
Adolescent & young adult struggles: supporting the whole family system around a young person who is going through something hard
Blended & restructured families: navigating new configurations with care, honesty, and room for everyone
Intergenerational patterns: the dynamics, loyalties, and wounds that move across generations
Grief & loss: when a family is carrying something together and needs space to do that
Major transitions: divorce, separation, illness, relocation, and the reorganization they require
Estrangement & repair: carefully, honestly, at whatever pace is possible
Cultural & identity dynamics: when generational, cultural, or identity differences are creating distance within a family
What the sessions look like
Family therapy sessions involve whoever is part of the system and willing to engage, which might be the whole family, a subsystem, or shifting configurations over time. I work with the family as a whole, with individuals within it, and with the relationship between members, depending on what the moment needs.
Sessions are active, not passive. I'm present in the room, curious, engaged, willing to name what I'm observing and to stay with the difficulty. This is collaborative work, but it has direction. We're always oriented toward something: more honesty, more flexibility, more room for each person to exist more fully within the family and outside of it.
Something worth saying
Family therapy can feel exposing. Coming into a room together, with all of the history between you, and trying to do something different, that takes real courage from everyone involved. The goal is never to assign blame or identify a villain. It's to understand the system well enough that the system can change, so that each person within it has more room to breathe, to be known, and to relate differently.
Format & availability
Family therapy sessions are 60–90 minutes and offered online. I work with families of all structures, backgrounds, and configurations. Sessions can involve the full family or specific members depending on what the work requires.
Ready to begin?
I offer a free 20-minute consultation to talk through what's happening and whether family therapy feels like the right fit.
Reach out, let's find out together.