Family Therapy

I have been working with couples and families for my entire career. I have developed an effective approach to help families ands couples stop blaming and to develop a solutions-focus. We can work on effective conflict resolution so that partners and families are able to reconnect as partners/groups.

Develop empathic understanding of all family members perspectives

Goals of family therapy often include improving the communication, solving family problems, understanding and handling special family situations, and creating a better functioning home environment.

I have many years of experience in assessing family dynamics and systems. With this knowledge, I have and am able to help families navigate through challenging emotions and conflict leading to healthier communication and relationships.

Integrating family into the work with children and adolescents is key and family therapy is a big part of the work I do. For young people struggling with disordered eating, I am also trained in Family Based Therapy specifically for supporting families in feeding their child.

Family therapy is an integral part of treatment with adolescents and teens. Family therapy helps encourage effective communication between family members. I have utilized family therapy as the cornerstone of my work with adolescents and teens and even young adults over the past 20 years. "You don't live in a bubble. What you do and say affect others. Let's figure out how best to communicate." - Lara Murphy, LMFT

I provide shorter-term family therapy (up to 12 sessions over 3-6 months) using Ross Greene's Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model. You may be a good fit for this if your child is struggling with behavioral challenges and you want to figure out how to address the issues without being in therapy for years.

We provide therapy services to children, adolescents, and families . We also work with parents in supporting their children.

I love working with family clients, due to the opportunity for richer relationships and healing from generational patterns. I help families break ineffective cycles of communication that move them farther apart rather than closer together.

Family therapy can include adult siblings with their parents or teenagers with their parents or adult siblings alone. Through structure-guided conversation, whatever issues have created difficulties in the family, they can begin to heal.

My focus and track in graduate school was couples and families and I have continued my work since constantly obtaining new education and reading about techniques.

Family therapy has been a critical part of my private practice experience for the last 11 years. Family therapy is often overlooked when treating adolescents and young adults. I help families understand that they function as a system, and support each person in understanding their role that contributes to the family dynamic. I utilize talk therapy as well as in-session structured activities to encourage connection, healthy confrontation, and healing within the family.

I have completed training in Functional Family Therapy. It is a 3 stage model that seeks to identify the underlying emotions that are leading to the conflict in the family, then choosing specific skills to address these and make change, and finally to discuss how to maintain the changes made during therapy.

There are various fictions floating around about what it takes to be a perfect family. However, the emphasis on perfect is destructive, because it’s an impossible goal. The point is more to have a loving, well-functioning family where kids are cherished and supported to become thriving, fulfilled adults who themselves know how to have good (not perfect) relationships. This always requires constant adaptation and tinkering. I love working with motivated families!

Bowen is my main jam but I also use elements of Structural Family Therapy and Strategic Family Therapy. My plan is that I teach you about systems, how they work, and how to shift an unhealthy one. If you have a teen that's running the show at home I'm going to help you and your partner to get back into the position of leadership. No teen should be the head of the family. If you have pain in the ass in-laws or your own family I'm going to introduce you to the wonderful world of boundaries.

My passion is to help families who are hanging on by a string. The love that parents have for their children is universal. Every parent wants to provide their children with more than what they had growing up. But the blueprint of parenting that we were raised by is entirely different from the blueprint needed to raise a teen in our ever-changing, technology-driven, modern day culture. Parenting is the most humbling journey with the most steep learning curve but you are not alone.

I truly enjoy working with adult family members to come together to change and heal. Families tell me that my humor, strengths-based nature, and ability to be on everyone’s team at the same time are qualities that help them take courageous risks in therapy. I help family members connect with one another emotionally, to help them understand the dynamics that keep them in unhelpful interaction patterns, and identify the intergenerational ways they have built their family story.