Caught in Conflict With Your Child? Find Your Way Back to Connection.
Family Therapy for Stronger Connections
Summit Counseling's family therapy is designed for families with children and adolescents who are experiencing conflict, disconnection, or recurring behavioral and emotional challenges.
The first step is creating a sense of safety, reducing conflict, and helping the family develop hope that things can change. Together, we identify the recurring patterns that keep the family stuck and explore what is happening beneath the behavior.
Our approach is not about assigning blame. Instead, we work to understand each family member's underlying emotions, intentions, needs, and perspective—and how these interact to create the family's cycle. When family members feel understood rather than blamed, it becomes easier to respond differently. The family begins to blame the negative cycle they get into rather than each other.
From there, the therapist helps the family practice new ways of communicating, responding, and connecting. As these new patterns take hold, families often experience greater understanding, empathy, cooperation, and emotional security, while the behaviors that brought them to therapy begin to change.
The goal is not simply to change a child's behavior. It is to strengthen the relationships and family system that support lasting change.
Emotionally-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT)
At Summit Counseling, we use Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) to help families understand the emotional patterns that can create conflict, distance, and disconnection—and to build stronger, more secure relationships.
When families become stuck, behavior is often only part of the story. Beneath anger, withdrawal, defiance, or conflict are often unmet emotional needs, fears, and attempts to find safety or connection. EFFT helps family members understand what is happening beneath the behavior and recognize the cycles that keep everyone stuck.
Rather than assigning blame, we help each family member feel understood, express what is happening beneath the surface, and respond to one another in new ways. Over time, these experiences can create greater emotional safety, trust, empathy, and connection within the family.
EFFT can be particularly helpful for families navigating behavioral challenges, conflict, trauma, loss, major life transitions, and emotional disconnection.
Depending on the family's needs, therapy may include individual sessions with family members as well as sessions with the family together. The goal is to bring the insights and changes from individual work into the relationships where they matter most.
The goal isn't simply to change behavior. It's to change the relationship patterns underneath the behavior—so families can reconnect, repair, and move forward together.
Case Example: Emotionally Focused Family Therapy
A mother brings her teenage daughter to therapy because their relationship has become increasingly conflictual. The mother places significant emphasis on academic achievement and expects her daughter to earn high grades. The daughter experiences these expectations as overwhelming and unattainable. As conflict escalates, she begins arriving late to and from school, is caught smoking marijuana with friends, withdraws socially, and becomes increasingly self-critical when she does not earn an high grades.
At first, the family appears caught in a familiar cycle: the more worried the mother becomes, the more she pushes; the more the mother pushes, the more the daughter withdraws, resists, or acts out. The daughter's withdrawal then increases the mother's fear and urgency, which leads her to push even harder.
In EFFT, the therapist helps the family slow this cycle down rather than focusing immediately on changing the daughter's behavior. The therapist explores what is happening emotionally for each person beneath the conflict.
The mother initially presents as frustrated and demanding. Through emotion-focused exploration, the therapist helps her move beneath the frustration to the fear underneath it: “If I don't push her, I'm afraid she won't be prepared for the future. I don't want her to struggle the way I did.”
Beneath that underlies mom’s fear to be seen as a failing, which is a tender spot from her own developmental history.
The therapist then explores the origins of that fear. The mother remembers growing up with parents who placed enormous importance on academic achievement. She recognizes that their expectations helped her become successful, but also recalls feeling that she had to earn their approval and that she missed important parts of being a child. Beneath her determination to make sure her daughter succeeds is a deeper fear of failing her daughter as a parent.
The therapist then helps the daughter access what is underneath her resistance. Rather than simply focusing on her anger or rule-breaking, the therapist explores the more vulnerable emotions beneath it. The daughter begins to articulate something closer to: “When you keep telling me I'm not doing enough, I feel like you don't think I'm good enough. I feel like nothing I do will make you proud of me.”
This becomes an important EFT enactment. Rather than having the daughter explain this only to the therapist, the therapist helps her turn toward her mother and communicate the vulnerable emotion directly:
“Mom, when you keep pushing me about my grades, I don't just feel angry. I start to feel like I'm disappointing you and that I'm not good enough for you.”
The therapist then helps the mother stay emotionally present rather than becoming defensive or returning to the importance of grades. She begins to hear the vulnerability beneath her daughter's behavior and responds differently.
The therapist may then help the mother communicate her own underlying emotion:
“I'm realizing that when I push you, it's because I'm scared. I want you to be successful, but I didn't realize that my fear was making you feel like you weren't good enough.”
For the first time, mother and daughter begin to experience one another differently. The daughter is no longer simply the “defiant teenager,” and the mother is no longer simply the “controlling parent.” They begin to see the fear, longing, hurt, and desire for connection underneath their respective positions.
The therapist helps the family identify their negative cycle and practice new interactions in which the mother can express concern without criticism or excessive pressure, while the daughter can communicate her needs without withdrawing or acting out.
As these new interactions become more consistent, the family can begin negotiating realistic expectations around academics, friendships, independence, and responsibility. The focus shifts from “How do we get our daughter to behave?” to “How can we create a relationship in which our daughter feels supported enough to take responsibility and our mother feels confident enough to let go?”
Ultimately, the goal of EFFT is not simply to eliminate the daughter's problematic behaviors. It is to change the emotional cycle that has developed between mother and daughter, repair the disconnection underneath the conflict, and help them develop a relationship in which both feel understood, valued, and emotionally secure.