Family Therapy for the Relationships That Shape Everything Else

Family & Relational Therapy in Santa Monica, Thousand Oaks, and Across California

Does this sound familiar?

✓ You and your adult child (or parent) love each other but keep hitting the same painful patterns. ✓ Conversations turn into conflict before either of you means for them to. ✓ You're a parent wanting to do things differently than how you were raised, but aren't sure how. ✓ Sibling relationships feel strained by old roles, comparisons, or unresolved history. ✓ You want more closeness, but old hurt or misunderstanding keeps getting in the way.

Family Relationships Are Where Our Deepest Patterns Begin

Our earliest relationships shape how we experience trust, safety, communication, and connection for the rest of our lives. When those relationships feel strained, misunderstood, or stuck in repeating patterns, it can affect not just the family members involved, but nearly every other relationship in a person's life.

Types of Family Therapy

  • Parenting and Parent-Child Relationships

    Helping parents understand their child's emotional world, respond to big feelings with more attunement, and break unhelpful patterns passed down from their own upbringing.

  • Sibling Relationships

    Addressing old roles, rivalry, comparison, or distance that developed over years, and finding new ways to relate as adults.

  • Adult child and parent relationships

    Repairing communication, understanding each other across different life stages, and working through longstanding hurt or misunderstanding.

Why These Relationships Can Be So Hard to Change

Family patterns often form early and repeat automatically, long after the original circumstances that created them have changed. A parent and adult child may still be caught in roles established decades earlier. Siblings may still be relating to each other through the lens of childhood comparisons. A parent may find themselves reacting to their child in ways that echo their own upbringing, even when they consciously want something different.

These patterns aren't a sign of a "broken" family. They're often protective responses that made sense at one point and simply haven't had the chance to shift.

How Therapy Can Help

Depending on your specific situation, our work may focus on:

  • Improving communication and reducing repeated conflict

  • Understanding each family member's perspective and emotional experience

  • Identifying and interrupting patterns passed down across generations

  • Rebuilding trust and repairing ruptures

  • Supporting parents in responding to their children with greater attunement and consistency

  • Navigating sibling dynamics with more clarity and less old baggage

  • Creating space for each person to feel seen, heard, and understood

My Approach

My approach integrates Gottman communication tools and psychodynamic and relational therapy to help family members understand not just what's happening in their relationships, but why — including the communication patterns and deeper relational history underneath the surface conflict.

I work with adult child-parent pairs, siblings, and parents seeking individual support around their parenting relationship, always at a pace that feels collaborative and manageable for everyone involved.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • We offer a range of solutions designed to meet your needs—whether you're just getting started or scaling something bigger. Everything is tailored to help you move forward with clarity and confidence.Both. Depending on the situation, this can include sessions with both people present, or individual therapy focused specifically on understanding and improving a family relationship.

  • Yes. Meaningful change is often possible even when only one family member is in therapy, since shifting your own patterns, responses, and understanding can shift the relationship as a whole.

  • Yes. Many parents seek support specifically to understand patterns from their own childhood so they don't unintentionally repeat them, and to develop more intentional, attuned ways of responding to their own children.

  • Both. I work with adult siblings navigating old roles, distance, or conflict, as well as parent-child relationships across a range of ages and life stages.

  • Yes. I offer in-person sessions in Santa Monica and Thousand Oaks, as well as virtual therapy for clients throughout California.