Counselors can help stepfamilies normalize their struggles, navigate complex family dynamics, and work toward establishing a more cohesive, stable and supportive family environment.
Tag: Marriage
In some cases, counselors may need to tweak their own ways of thinking before offering clients in a relationship alternative ways of relating to each other.
It’s a distressing reality, but advice for the newly divorced might be as common as advice for the newly married. Advice for the newly divorced often centers around protecting any children who might be involved because although parents get divorced from each other, children become divorced from the only life
Few topics are more controversial or downright uncomfortable to talk about than sex and sexuality. It seems we could examine any period of time in human history and find a number of social values and ideas related to sexual behavior, all of which might be discussed with some nuanced language
During the counseling process, most clients will describe some form of interpersonal or relational trouble. This trouble might be identified as relationship dissatisfaction, conflict in a marriage or partnership, or even the absence of relationship (loneliness). One theoretical approach — emotionally focused therapy (EFT) — works well in individual, family
“W hat are you?” That is a question commonly asked of individuals who are multiracial. As a society, we have gotten used to checking off a metaphorical — and often literal — “box” when it comes to questions of race. We seem to expect everyone to “just pick one.” But the
According to census data, there were roughly 125,000 same-sex couples raising approximately 220,000 children in the United States in 2010. Since that time, increasing numbers of same-sex couples have declared committed partnerships, capturing the attention of policymakers and bringing the issue of legal recognition of same-sex partnerships to the forefront of
Among the most common difficulties that bring couples to counseling are infidelity, financial problems, sex and intimacy issues, parenting challenges and ongoing tensions with the in-laws. Each of these problems has its own unique characteristics, but according to couples counselors, they tend to share a similar root cause — namely, lack
It can take anywhere from four to seven years for a stepfamily to successfully blend, according to Joshua M. Gold in his book Stepping In, Stepping Out: Creating Stepfamily Rhythm. The formation of a stepfamily is “uncharted water for everyone,” he says. Not only do parents and children each carry
As counselors, we come in contact with clients who are angry or heartbroken and oftentimes feel defeated. This sense of pain and loss is frequently realized in the forensic setting in which I work with parents who are desperate to rebuild a parent-child relationship that is severely damaged or estranged.