Our therapists provide family therapy in Media, PA

The therapy approach I use for helping families is Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy. This focuses on exploring the impacts of the parenting style, home setting, and community to help support positive growth in a child and relationships they have.

I assist families in building the following skills to meet their treatment goals in family therapy:

• Communication skill: Promotes appropriate verbalization and reception of needs before they become larger issues
• Emotional regulation techniques: To better manage physical symptoms of emotions to promote values-based action as opposed to emotional reactive behaviors
• Cognitive coping skills: To assist with managing automatic thoughts that impact our emotions and to process core beliefs that impact our perception of the world we interact with
• Acceptance: Working with clients to identify what is outside of their control in the moment and working to shift focus to action on things that they can control
• Mindfulness: Supports a client to be better grounded in the present moment, build observation skills of a client's internal and external experience, and moving past their judgements to see things and situations as they are

I know clients are making progress in therapy when they are less often moving away for uncomfortable situation and emotions and are more often moving towards their values and goals through action. Clients are typically utilizing the skills learned in therapy outside of the therapy office to increase the likelihood these values based actions. Clients also tend to demonstrate a greater level of insight into their emotions and report a decreased impact of these emotions on their decision making.

To supplement therapy, clients can practice and implement the skills learned in therapy in their day to day lives. It is also important to engage in preventative strategies, such as a regular sleep scheduled, healthy diet, appropriate work life balance, engagement with positive social support, and hobbies, as they can improve our overall emotional well-being throughout the day. While these are not possible all the time, the more we engage with them, the more benefits we receive from that action.

To prepare for their first family therapy session, all an individual needs to bring with them is an attitude that is honest, open to alternative perspective, and a willingness to try the interventions suggested in the session. It also can be helpful to have a general idea of what the client's goals for therapy may be. The client should be prepared to answer some general questions about themselves to give the therapist a clearer picture of who they are.