What family therapy is, plainly.
Two or more family members in a room — sometimes the whole family, sometimes parents and an adult child, sometimes adult siblings working through something together — with a clinician helping the conversation be more useful than it would be on its own. The work happens in the relationships, not just inside any one person.
Common reasons families come in.
- One family member is struggling — anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, addiction — and the family wants to support without making it worse.
- Long-running tension or conflict that nobody quite knows how to address.
- A transition: a child becoming an adult, a parent becoming ill, a divorce, a remarriage, a move, a death.
- An adult child re-engaging with parents after time apart.
- Adult siblings navigating caretaking decisions for a parent.
- Multicultural families navigating generational, language, and cultural differences.
- LGBTQ+ family members and parents working through coming-out conversations or relationship recognition.
What a session looks like.
Sessions are 60–80 minutes. Members attend together; sometimes individual sessions are added. The clinician's job is to slow the conversation down, surface what's underneath surface conflict, and help the family build patterns that work better for everyone in the room. The goal is rarely to "fix" one person. It's to change how the system functions.
How we approach the work.
We draw on structural family therapy, systemic therapy, and emotionally-focused family therapy, integrated with what each family in the room actually needs. We are explicit about cultural context — multilingual families especially, and we have clinicians who can hold sessions in Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Hindi, Italian, Arabic, and Armenian when the conversation is easier in someone's first language.
You don't have to figure this out alone.
Reach out and we'll do an intake call to understand your family's situation. Sometimes family therapy is the right starting point; sometimes individual work for one or two members first sets up the family work to land. We'll be honest about which seems right.
Book a family session Call (626) 354-6440