Family Counseling Services in Elmont, NY.

In this day and age there is a lot that families have to contend with. At Family Guiding, we bring a fresh perspective and use a collaborative approach to helping families. We can help you use effective parenting techniques, manage challenging behaviors, increase healthy communication with your spouse and children and experience more peaceful interactions at home.

Growing together with our loved ones can be an amazing gift. Somewhere along the line we sometimes struggle with those closest to us. We may bring our old emotional issues into a new relationship or perhaps we find our old ways of communicating with our loved one is no longer working the way it used to. Change is difficult but taking steps to increase communication and sort out our old beliefs that no longer serve us, can bring new light and joy to the relationships we cherish.

Family therapy will include working together to help improve communication, handle difficult conversations, making changes in dynamics, discuss life transitions that can impact others. Utilizing a Family Systems approach will take place in sessions. Formulating individual and family goals will be explored and a plan of action will take place with concrete goals.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for couples focuses on strengthening the emotional bond between partners. Through structured sessions, we explore underlying patterns and attachment needs driving relationship dynamics. Using interventions aimed at fostering empathy and understanding, we facilitate open communication and emotional expression. Couples learn to recognize and address negative interaction cycles, replacing them with healthier patterns of connection and responsiveness. EFT emphasizes creating a secure attachment bond, fostering feelings of safety and trust within the relationship. By deepening emotional intimacy and building a stronger connection, couples experience wellness.

I enjoy doing both family counseling. I get to know each member of the family individually and the family dynamic, and how each person perceives the presenting problem. I am careful not to take sides and blame any one family member. All deserve respect. I work to learn more and to help you be more curious about whatever problem you are coming to me to resolve.

Nearly all families deal with some sort of stress or conflict at one point or another. In the middle of what can seem like the most difficult time for your family, actually lies opportunity. Through therapy, I can help family members begin to understand one another better, improve their communication, and resolve conflicts, leading to healthier and more secure relationships. Your family is the most powerful resource. Let’s strengthen it together.

Family issues can feel daunting. They can cause much inner stress, grief and even illness. Addressing tension in family relationships is key to living a happy, wholesome life. I see each individual as a sub-unit of family life. I have done great systems work in working with the entire family unit, in creating a space to discuss issues, allow anger, and at the same time, finding a space to develop creative solutions and better ways of working through conflict and pain. Together we create a space to process the strained dynamic and work on understanding, respecting and improving connection with one another, allowing space for harmony, compassion and love to be expressed.

The journey of life is filled with joy, disappointments, loss and renewal. Integrative Healing Family Therapy@ helps a child, adolescent and adult to find the strength to review life's troubling issues and to form new perceptions and change behaviors. It is essential to view the presented problems and pain as part of a larger system (famly of origin and extended family). The therapist connects with individual issues and personality characteristics to appreciate the individuals as well as the family's contribution to dysfunction. Therapist respects individual and family contexts and works with the family members to resolve issues where new boundaries and healthier interactions are attained.

Family therapy is often times a necessary extention to individual therapy. Families are supposed to work as a system. Sometimes the system breaks down and one member may be viewed as the broken piece. Until the system comes together to work through what is really happening the problem often persists. In therapy together we can look at your system as a whole. Let's open lines of communication between family members, improve your relationships and begin enjoying your lives together again.

My approach to family therapy is to look for the source of the family conflict. After over 37 years of practice, I can usually zero in on what is going on. Sometimes one parent is out of control. Sometimes parents are in conflict over child-rearing practices; one is too permissive and one too strict. Sometimes one child is favored over another. I generally meet with the whole family over a period of time, encouraging honest and constructive communication. Through patient guidance, the problems surface and are worked out.

Individuals can learn about how their family dynamics impacted life experiences and shaped thoughts and belief systems. Clients can begin healing from emotionally immature parents and learn emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills to navigate emotional experiences and relationship. Clients can recognize patterns within relationships and learn how to cultivate healthier relationships.

Most family therapists inadvertently create more chaos through their well-intentioned efforts to assist a family move through a change process. Why? Brains are inherently deregulated (all of us, may I add) and most talking and dialoguing misses brain-centric problems that need more intensive help. Many times the emotional trauma created by years of solving problems ineffectively can wreak havoc on the brain's parasympathetic nervous system, not ever giving the family a break from flight or fight thinking. Contact us for an innovative neuroscience solution to family dysfunction. Kevin@kevinflemingphd.com or 877-606-6161.

Families experience developmental stages, just like people do. Families are made up of individuals that require love, respect and must also exhibit a certain amount of cooperation to work together successfully. When families stop growing together and grow apart, there are many reasons why this might occur, and it is time to see a therapist experienced in the challenges of working with families. I will seek to restore the hierarchy - parents in the executive role and children learning and growing using the love and respect they receive from good parenting. I will work with the values and rules you prescribe for your family, and increase communication and cooperation.