Family Therapy

My family therapy sessions aim to resolve your family's conflicts, stabilize its environment, and improve its relationships. I believe your family possesses the unique strengths and resources to foster healing. Some of the areas addressed in my family therapy sessions include:

• Negative Impact of Marital Problems on Children - Poor communication, continuous conflict, and alienation between parents can affect a child's sense of security, feelings of self-worth, personal behavior, vulnerability to bad influences, and performance in school. Family therapy can address your marital issues and suggest strategies for minimizing their negative effects on your children.
• Strain of Parent-Child Problems on the Marriage - The demands of parenting challenging children can interfere with your relationship with your spouse, resulting in feelings of frustration, abandonment, resentment, and guilt. Family therapy seeks to facilitate understanding between spouses and suggest techniques for working together to resolve parent-child issues.
• Sibling Relationships - In instances of constant conflict with little hope of resolution, family therapy provides a means of establishing respect and understanding between siblings, as well as skills to resolve future problems.
• Making Blended Families Work - Blended families often do not function in the same way as biological families. Family therapy can assist your step-family in adjusting and establishing healthy relationships and appropriate boundaries.
• Balancing Family Roles - An imbalance among your work, your role as a parent, and that as a spouse can create resentment and tension in families. Family therapy helps identify when an imbalance exists and suggest techniques for equalizing your roles.
• Children with Special Needs - The challenges and obstacles facing families of children with special needs can be overwhelming. Family therapy can facilitate communication, suggest coping and parenting skills, and connect your family with local resources.
• Coping with Aging Parents - The sacrifices and emotional demands of caring for aging parents can strain a marriage and create a tension your whole family can feel. In family therapy members can express their feelings about the situation and work toward supporting one another.
• Caring for Chronically Ill Partners - Caring for ill spouses or partners can be physically and emotionally draining and result in complex feelings of fear, anxiety, guilt, and resentment. Family therapy provides an outlet for expressing your emotions and offers coping techniques.
• Difficulty in Transitions - A change that impacts the whole family like moving, the birth of a new child, or the financial changes of a new job can affect each member of your family differently. Family therapy can bring to light any family member's difficulty in transition and offer coping strategies.
• Grief/Loss - No two family members react to death and other experiences of loss in exactly the same way or grieve according to the same timeline. Family therapy can illuminate where each member of your family is in his/her mourning, offer grief counseling or loss therapy, and facilitate understanding and support in this difficult time.
• Substance Abuse - Family therapy can help you cope with instances of addiction and the resultant serious effect a family member's substance abuse has on your family unit.
• Discipline and Structure for Children - Discipline problems put a big strain on parent-child relationships and can cause or worsen existing marital problems. Lack of structure weakens a child's sense of security. Family therapy seeks to improve your parent-child communication and suggest parenting techniques.
• Difficult Adolescents/Teens - Family therapy can help identify why kids and teens act out or have problems in school. Once the source of the problem is detected, strategies for remedying the issue can be suggested.
• Failure of Child to Launch Out of the Home - Certain variables contribute to a child's reluctance to move from his parents' home and begin his own life. Family therapy can determine the reasons behind your child's failure to launch, address his fears and anxieties and promote new confidence in looking toward the future.

Experience the Benefits of Family Therapy

I seek to provide a nurturing, supportive environment conducive to facilitating recovery and improving the relationships among your family members. Our family therapy sessions will motivate your family to adjust their attitudes, expectations, behaviors, and priorities in favor of promoting understanding of one another and achieving family health. Please contact me today to discover how family therapy can help you.

Karen Rowinsky, LSCSW, offers one-on-one counseling, marriage counseling and couples therapy, family therapy, and relationship coaching. Her Overland Park, Kansas office services clients from the Overland Park, Leawood, Lenexa, Olathe, and Kansas City, MO areas.