Do you feel like you’ve hit a wall? You’re spinning in circles? You keep reliving past experiences? Or perhaps you and your partner are having the same fights over and over again with no resolution. Maybe you’re a parent floating along in a sea of chaos that you can’t ever seem to bring order to. Feeling alone, lost, or ashamed that you ‘can’t handle this’ or you ‘should know what to do’ — everyone else seems to be doing just fine.
There is no Life Manual, no Relationship Guide, no Parenting Handbook given to you as you navigate your life. We all depend on the lessons learned in our childhood and experience gained throughout the journey to help us navigate the challenges we face. Sometimes you didn’t get very good lessons in childhood and now you’re feeling as though you lack the skills to improve your life, relationship, or family. Sometimes your experiences didn't prepare you for the complexity of juggling every aspect of adulthood, the reality of sharing your life with a partner, or struggling to maintain your own identity as you became a parent (“I used to be more than just Mom/Dad!”).
Life pushes us and challenges us, and one of the great myths is that you have to endure the trials on your own. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective (especially one with specialized training!) to help you see things clearly or understand what’s really going on. You are an inherently good, healthy human being - sometimes the ‘dirt’ of life gets in the way of seeing that for yourself and being able to move forward. Our job is to support you in finding out what’s holding you back or complicating your life, and helping you figure out how to become unstuck and empowered in your own choices.
Services
Individual Therapy
As adults, we express our childhood experiences in our everyday behaviors. Without realizing it, we repeat patterns of behaviors that we witnessed or participated in as children. Some of these behaviors are positive, but others have created unnecessary challenges in our current lives.
We are able to support our clients in a unique way by connecting their current challenges with their childhood experiences. We can explore why these experiences are being repeated in your adult life, and process how your unexplored emotions may be impacting you. This allows the client to heal the origin of their negative patterns and move forward into constructive behaviors and a more fulfilling life.
Parenting Therapy
The echoes of our childhood experiences also follow us into parenthood. Some parents want a better relationship with their own children, but don’t know how to make that happen. When your parents don’t (or can’t) teach you how to be healthy, loving parents how do you know what to do with your own children? Identifying the negative parenting patterns from your own childhood and how they manifest in your own parenting style can help us determine what kind of support you need as a parent, and as an individual, to move forward from your past to stop the cycle of dysfunction or abuse.
Perinatal/Postpartum Therapy
Becoming a parent affects everyone differently, and sometimes how you feel changes from day to day. For some parents (yes fathers too!), this can manifest as Postpartum Depression or Postpartum Anxiety. While doctors are able to prescribe help in the form of medication, they are often limited in their ability to emotionally support parents during this time.
This is a safe place to share concerns and fears, with no judgment or shame. This is often one of the most isolating times in a parent’s life and it is also the time when you most need to talk to someone. We will work with you to support you emotionally, as we figure out what it is you need from yourself and your support system as you learn how to navigate this new stage of your life.
Family Therapy
Many families find they need help with the day to day chaos of life. We are able to provide support for a wide range of challenging family dynamics. If even one family member, especially a child, is having daily struggles the entire family feels the tension. Sometimes our job is to educate parents about developmental stages and what that looks like for their child. Another common concern is miscommunication between parent and child. Children and adults interpret the world differently, and when parents begin to understand how their child is thinking and feeling, the entire family unit becomes stronger. We will work together to ensure you feel confident as parents, and that your child or children feel secure as we work through the challenges you all face.
Relationship Therapy
In relationship, the experience of your own parents becomes your blueprint for how to be in a loving relationship. Some people look for a relationship like their parents had, for better or worse, while others look to find a relationship that is quite the opposite from the one they witnessed as a child. Either way, the lessons we learn from our parents about being a partner are deeply ingrained in our psyche. We often find ourselves responding in a way that surprises us, and we don’t know where that comment or behavior came from. In therapy we are able to work together to identify what is coming from ‘you’ versus what is coming from your unconscious expectations of a relationship stemming from your childhood. Once we bring those expectations out into the open you can examine them and decide what it is you both actually want from your relationship in the future.
Relationships of all gender, sexual orientation, and relational paradigms are welcome here.