Family therapy services in 17363: Stewartstown, PA. Relationship and couples counseling.

Family relationships are hard and demanding and frustrating. We strive for peace and harmony in our homes and often find ourselves angry, in tears and feeling powerless. I work with nuclear families, blended families and adoptive families who are living in chaos. I educate parents on setting appropriate limits and boundaries and STICKING TO THEM while also teaching kids how to have respect, follow rules as well as having an appropriate voice and getting their needs met. You WILL see positive results; bringing structure and balance into the home is the bare minimum you will experience, when you find yourselves laughing together as a family, you will know you have arrived.

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!)

Oftentimes, one person will be identified as the problem in a family system, but, oftentimes, they are simply the one who has been showing the symptoms of the dysfunction in the family, rather than themselves having an individual issue. Families can address this by sitting down and talking with each other, with an impartial third party, to discover what is happening within the family and what can be done to fix it.

I cannot imagine a family out there that does not want to be happy. But life happens. Things can become dysfunctional as family members come and go (planned or unexpectedly), structure and hierarchy change, illness strikes, conflict escalates, addiction is discovered, careers are earned and lost, and communication comes to a standstill. Through mutually agreed upon ground rules, therapy will be the place for each family member to share their experience without fear of retribution and to have the opportunity to be heard without interruption. Then, through a variety of strategies, we work together to reorganize the family's energies and move towards a positive outcome.

I primarily work with families who have been impacted by chronic health or medical conditions. Managing the burden of a medical condition can be overwhelming at times, and it can have an impact on the whole family. The families I work with benefit from parent support, increasing confidence in the medical setting, and improving interactions around symptoms. This work results in an overall improvement in quality of life not just for the person who has the medical condition, but for the family as a whole.

Petra Psychological Services believes in building the community one family at a time. Strong families are fundamental in raising healthy functioning productive individuals. Therapy is focused around understanding family dynamics, problem solving, expression of feelings, establishing healthy boundaries and individuality and functioning within the family unit.