What is Family Therapy?
Family is anyone who plays a long-term supportive role in one’s life, which may not mean blood relations or family members in the same household. Family therapy helps families to heal from past trauma’s and old arguments, gain communication skills and to learn skills to find ways to grow together. Each person in the family unit is affected by other members in the family group, so family therapists are trained to understand how to educate the family to interact in a healthier manner.
Your family is your heart. I understand that when any member of a family hurts, the whole family hurts too. Regardless of your circumstance or events, your family deserves wellness and happiness every day.
The real key to parenting is to be gentle, consistent, decisive and calm. With 99% of parents who scream, hit and shout, it’s the parent who is having the temper tantrum, not the kid. It’s a sign that the parent:
Family members need help to understand different perceptions and need help to learn how to respect (sometimes) very opposing views. I will help your family to engage in healthy dialogue to gain better understanding of one another. Most importantly, I will provide a safe space for family members to talk and listen to one another about sometimes very painful and distressing experiences.
Through intensive training as a Registered Behavioral Technician, I learned the in’s and outs of Applied Behavioral Analysis. It was clear, when I was in my late teens and deciding my educational path, that I had a passion for working with individuals who experience life in a unique way and who had exceptional abilities. The autism spectrum is just that – a varied and diverse spectrum of individuals. Generally, individuals with Autism share some common experiences like having difficulty with the social world. Social difficulty may represent themselves in varied ways; from slight social unawareness to larger and more complex difficulties making and sustaining mutually satisfying relationships.
Many people with autism have communication issues that may present challenges at school, work or at home. Others who are diagnosed on the autism spectrum may struggle with debilitating anxiety, troubling sleep issues, or differences in emotional regulation.
Regardless, people with autism are first and foremost people. Each person deserves treatment that is respectful, dignified and understands the values and uniqueness of the individual. I understand that every person has value and is worthy of love. My therapeutic approach is designed to make each person feel happier and more confident than they did when they started.
Behavioral parent therapy is my approach to teaching parents how to reinforce desirable behaviors in their children, discourage unwanted behaviors, and improve parent-child interactions. In this form of therapy, the parents play a significant role in treating their children’s behavior problems. During the therapy sessions, parents learn how to carefully observe their children’s behaviors at home and are taught skills to reward their children’s positive behaviors by using praise, positive attention, and rewards. They are also taught to use rule-setting, time-out, and ignoring to discourage bad behaviors.
Modeling is a form of therapy in which a therapist demonstrates a non-fearful response to a negative situation in order to promote imitation in the child or adolescent. It has been proven to be effective in treating anxiety in children and adolescents.
Behavioral therapies for children and adolescents vary widely, but they all focus primarily on how some problematic thoughts or negative behaviors may unknowingly or unintentionally get “rewarded” within a young person’s environment. These rewards or reinforcements often contribute to an increase in the frequency of these undesirable thoughts and behaviors. Behavior therapies can be applied to a wide range of psychological symptoms among adolescents and children.
Although behavioral therapies can vary substantially based on individual needs, a common thread is that behavioral therapists encourage children and adolescents to try new behaviors, reward desired behaviors, and to allow unwanted behaviors to “extinguish” (that is, ignore unwanted behaviors).
For instance, imagine a teenager who has difficulty completing homework. To encourage desired behaviors (e.g., homework completion), the parents institute a reward plan that includes earning points each day that homework is completed that can be traded in for a desired reward at the end of the week (e.g., using the car to go to the movies with friends). The reward must be something the youth wants, and it must be specifically tied to a specific goal (homework completion). At first the youth works for the external reward, but over time, the task itself becomes easier and the reward can be faded out. Then, new goals can be generated.