Family Counseling Services in Rye, NY.

We come from a systems approach when working with families. We teach family members how to communicate more effectively with one another. There is an emphasis on personal responsibility and each family member looking at how their behavior is contributing to the problems. Building empathy between family members is also a main focus for us when working with families. We strive for families to leave sessions feeling more connected and understood by each other with the tools to be more successful in their communications. We do family therapy both in the office and in homes.

Family therapy is an active approach that Chris Colasuonno, LCSW-R uses to help bring peace and harmony for the family. There are a lot of dynamics in a family where psychotherapy and counseling can balance out clients and family. A family's culture, dynamics, viewpoint can play a big part in how a family interacts. Many families have issues with mental illness and substance abuse issues that effect each member. Some families benefit from couples therapy, relationship counseling that can lower anger and get individuals to communicate effectively. Chris possesses a lot of experience to balance out a family member's viewpoint using cognitive behavior therapy to find solutions.

My background is in MST or multi systemic Family Therapy. I believe that in some cases, the family system can be very vital to the mental health and emotional well- being of each person in the family. Everything with family work depends on the goals of the people involved. I do sessions with individuals and families within the system to better support the family unit and work with all parties to assist in fostering a more positive relationship, or less dysfunctional relationship, to preserve the family system. I also do parent and teen counseling to better support the family dynamic in concert with parent work to support parents and teens in their goals

We support primary caregivers and parents through difficult moments in their child's development or through life stressors that impact the whole family. We use a combination of parenting education, training you in effective parenting skills, and creative arts therapy with your child to develop a stronger way to communicate effectively with each other.

Families can carry either unhealed wounds or trauma and/or may have unhealthy communication patterns. These issues can be significantly improved with family therapy. I create a safe space for all parties to share their feelings in a healthy way, without blame, focusing on their own personal experience. I then provide exercises and tools to help them gain understanding of one another and validate one another. This has often been markedly lacking and can be very healing to receive. We go back in time to understand how the current dynamic in the family developed and with that understanding, how it can be shifted into a healthier dynamic.

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.

Family therapy availability is hard to find in our community right now. Serenity Life is proud to offer it. People seek out family therapy for a multitude of reasons and some most common that we treat are blended families, parent child conflicts, court ordered family therapy, support through divorce/separation, amongst other reasons. Each of our clinicians goes through extensive training in how to work with families and we provide senior education supervision on this topic regularly. We offer talk therapy interventions as well as creative arts therapy family interventions.