FAMILY & PARENTING SUPPORT
Families and Parenting
A family is always moving. Children grow, relationships change, and what worked beautifully in one season may no longer fit the next.
Sometimes worry brings a family to me. Sometimes everyone simply seems to have lost the thread of one another. Wherever your family finds itself, we can begin there.
The Boy Who Felt Everything
A boy I will call Timmy came to me after he threw a desk at his teacher. The rules in that classroom made no sense to him, and his body went from zero to sixty before any adult saw it coming. He felt everything. Light, sound, the tag inside his shirt, the mood of the person across the room, all of it arrived at full volume.
We started in the sand, where he could build the story before he found words for it. Later came the journeys he traveled in his imagination, then the quiet table time with the sound program and a warm hand resting near his kidneys until his breath dropped low again. One year the work moved onto a screen. He set his laptop on the ironing board in his bedroom so the table time could follow him home.
His parents watched all of it. One afternoon I told them I loved their son, and I wondered aloud whether a therapist gets to say such a thing. His father wept. The attachment, he said, was the healing his boy went hungry for.
At fourteen Timmy moved on to work with a man who could walk beside him as he became one himself. He still comes back once a year, well over six feet now, to laugh and to cry and to tell me his stories.
Children speak in behavior long before they speak in sentences.
A tantrum, a shut door, a refusal at bedtime: each one is a nervous system telling the truth about what it can carry. My work with families begins there, with the message underneath the behavior.
My work begins with the relationships around the child.
I work with parents of small children, with parents of adolescents, and with parents of rising twenties who seem to be drifting out of reach. Sometimes the whole family comes into the room. Sometimes I meet with the parents alone while the child stays home, since a child settles as the adults around him settle. We look at rhythm and ritual. We look at how repair happens after a rupture, and at the small daily moments where connection either builds or leaks away.
