Family Counseling Services in Rohnert Park, CA.

We so much want our homes and our families to be our safe haven and secure base, the place where we feel appreciated and loved. When this is an unhappy place with disharmony, anger, acting out , then our basis for well-being erodes. I am a relationship specialist. I have many years of experience helping family members express themselves effectively, hear one another clearly and experience new ways of being with each other that help everyone feel seen and cared for. When relationships are repaired and emotional connections re-established, children want to follow guidelines and respect limits. I work with pre-teens, adolescents, young adults and their parents. I bring families back together.

I offer a more loving, soulful approach to Family Therapy. I will teach you how to replace stonewalling and fighting patterns with time outs, mindfulness practices, nurturing talks, and scheduled boding activites. You will learn mindfulness techniques such as how to not step into your family member's negative energy when they stoke your anger. And by the way, I have been having great results with family therapy on Zoom!

I work within a family framework, but I do not treat families as part of traditional "family therapy." This means that if you are a parent and you struggle with your child's behavior, I can help you learn techniques to manage the behavior better. I have extensive experience working with parents of children with autism and other mental health disorders that can make parenting extremely challenging. There is no shame in asking for support. I can help with creating a parenting plan, I can help with co-parenting after divorce, and I can help parents who care for their own aging relatives. We truly live in the "sandwich generation" where family can grow far.

I specialize in online parent coaching with the goal of helping you and your family have a closer more intimate relationship. After 11 years of working with children and families, I have concluded that this is the most effective way I can support families because you parents are the leaders of your home. If I can empower you through my knowledge and experience to implement some strategies at home, you can achieve your goals for your family. The support I provide will be sufficient for many families, but there are some situations that could benefit from the in-vivo coaching and direction that in person family therapy provides. Call me for a free 15 minute consultation about your needs

Let me guess. One partner feels alone and like they don't matter and the other feels they are always being criticized and can't get anything right. The more one asks for the other to show up, the more the partner disappears physically and emotionally. You both bicker and fight and the idea of sitting and just hanging out seems elusive, if not impossible. Something like this? Often we crave connection but are blocked by the pain and the history that gets in the way. Small fights about little things become battles that highlight our struggle to have our basic relational needs met. I can help you get under the bickering to the parts crying out for connection- to an enriching relationship.

Imagine a family as a tree with branches, roots, trunk representing parts of the immediate and extended family. When working with families, all elements are considered. Usually there is a request for family therapy due to one of it's members in crisis, often a child. However, when an analysis of need is done it becomes apparent that more than one member of the family needs help in adjusting, growing and learning new behaviours. Clients contact me for a variety of reasons: to improve communications, solve family problems, support in special situations such as death, divorce, marriage, illness, child or adolescent issues.

How about your own Personal Family Therapist? The way it works is that a family hires me for a flat monthly fee. I work with family members on an as-needed basis, sometimes with one partner or the other, sometimes with the children, sometimes with everyone together. If one of the children wants to meet via Chat, I can make myself available for that . For a family to have a skilled healing professional on staff, someone who thinks well about the entire family, who knows and cares about every member of the family, is of tremendous value. Testimonial: "Every family going through divorce should have their own personal family therapist. Thank You Ilene, for all you have done for our family."

Most families who come in to see me consist of adult children and their parents. Usually if a family with young children want to see me with their kids, the issues are more about how to parent more effectively. In those cases, I work with the parents to improve the family situation. Let me know if you would like to talk further about your family situation.

When working with children and youth, the therapist cannot ignore the family system in which the child lives. I work with parents in multiple ways to help support youth in treatment, which may include separate parent sessions, co-parenting sessions, systemic family therapy, or Filial Therapy, a play therapy practice that coaches and guides parents in special play sessions with their child to decrease unwanted behaviors, improve relationships and communication, increase the child's emotional vocabulary, and increase the child's self-esteem.