Family Counseling Services in Philadelphia, PA.

Families are under tremendous pressure to function well together without having the skills to do that. I work with the family to develop skills in listening, appreciation, working more effectively as a team.In our current over-scheduled, over-pressured world, families are confronting problems they have little capacity to do anything about. We can tend to cope by getting stuck in a narrow range of behaviors and responses even if they are not helpful. A child who has learned to have temper tantrums when she is angry, and her parents who have learned to punish or pamper her, are stuck in maladaptive, non-growthful environments—‘a bad play’. It’s like playing the same part in the same play on the....

Family therapy acknowledges and nurtures the importance of mutually satisfying relationships with each family member. It is meant as a way to help you support your well-being by discovering healthier and stronger ways to relate to others. The family therapists at The Therapy Gal will work to help you understand more about the familial relationships in your life, how you can deal with them, the potential generational trauma and ultimately what tools you can use to improve these relationships.

Families are very interesting and fun to work with. Every family has a unique and powerful strength to survive any obstacle. That strength can be hard to find if it is covered by years of loss, pain, and/or trauma. I offer a systemic, structural family therapy model that helps families communicate more effectively, develop appropriate boundaries, create trusting and fulfilling relationships, and establish healthy attachments in order to make the home environment more enjoyable.

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.

One of the most common forms of Family Therapy is Structural Family Therapy. This modality focuses on examining how our family of origin, influences our relationships and engagement. This includes biological, adoptive and families of choice. The Eco-Systemic Structural Family Therapy approach also examines the larger ecosystem of a family, such as their community connection and support systems which can be used to help overcome challenges.

We are all relational beings, living within interactive, emotional systems. How we relate to our most significant others (spouse, children, siblings, etc.) can sometimes lapse into unpleasant scripts and powerful undercurrents of action-reaction, negative group-think, and ineffective authority roles. Restoring a sense of effective functioning, wellness and harmony (shalom) within family relationships can be aided by learning and practicing new ways to empathize, communicate, and collaborate with each other. Under certain conditions, families can even benefit from video sessions or teletherapy (if more convenient and less stressful than gathering everyone at a therapist's office!)

Distressed family members too often exclusively focus their efforts on changing their difficult sibling, parent, grandparent or in-law. This is ineffective. Difficult family members often resist such efforts. I teach each family member how to first work on changing their own self-defeating emotional and behavioral reactions in response to their difficult family members. Once someone calms down and not gets so upset about the other people in their family they can influence other people to find better ways to live with or at least gracefully tolerate each other. I show each family member how to work on themselves in order to have a better chance of influencing others. Think about this.