Family Therapy with
Compassionate Counselors
Support for the dynamics, conflicts, transitions, and relationships that shape your family life.
Families are complex because people are complex. Every family carries its own history, roles, stressors, loyalties, wounds, strengths, and ways of communicating. Sometimes those patterns help everyone feel connected and supported. Other times, they leave people feeling misunderstood, stuck, reactive, distant, or alone.
Understanding what’s beneath the surface
At Moving Forward Staying Present, our Portland-based therapists help families slow down the cycle, understand what is happening beneath the conflict, and build more effective ways of relating to one another. Family therapy can support parents, children, caregivers, adult children, siblings, blended families, co-parents, and families navigating grief, trauma, identity, neurodivergence, life transitions, or ongoing stress.
We welcome families of many structures, identities, cultures, and relationship styles. Our goal is to help your family understand what keeps repeating, what each person needs, and how you can move toward more connection, clarity, and repair. In family therapy, it is crucial to hear from everyone what their experience has been.
Family Therapy Services
Our therapists bring warmth, skill, curiosity, and clinical experience to family work. Depending on your family’s needs, therapy may focus on communication, emotional regulation, parenting support, relationship repair, attachment work, systems patterns, or support through a major transition.
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Family conflict often escalates quickly because everyone knows exactly where the tender spots are. Therapy can help your family identify the patterns that keep conversations from moving forward, practice more grounded communication, and create space for each person to feel heard without letting the conversation collapse into blame, shutdown, or defensiveness.
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Parenting can bring out deep fear, frustration, protectiveness, guilt, and uncertainty. Family therapy can help parents and caregivers build shared expectations, respond to behavioral or emotional concerns, and develop more consistent ways to support children and teens. We also help families navigate differences in parenting style, household structure, discipline, boundaries, values, and emotional needs.
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Adolescence often changes the entire family system. Teens need more autonomy, privacy, and identity exploration, while parents may feel unsure how to stay connected without becoming overly controlling or disconnected. Family therapy can support communication, trust-building, boundaries, repair after conflict, and better understanding across developmental stages.
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Blended families and co-parenting relationships require people to navigate loyalty, grief, changing roles, household differences, and new expectations. Therapy can help family members make sense of these transitions, communicate more clearly, and build family structures that feel more stable, reciprocal, and respectful.
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Families often respond to loss and transition in very different ways. A death, divorce, move, diagnosis, estrangement, job change, or major developmental shift can affect every person in the family differently. Therapy can help families make room for those differences while staying connected through the change.
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Trauma can shape communication, safety, trust, emotional reactivity, avoidance, and attachment patterns within a family. Our therapists work from a trauma-informed lens, helping families understand nervous system responses, reduce blame, and build more emotionally safe ways of engaging with one another. description
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When ADHD, autism, sensory needs, executive functioning challenges, anxiety, or emotional intensity are part of the family picture, therapy can help everyone better understand how this shows up in the family dynamic. We support families in building practical strategies, reducing shame, improving communication, and creating expectations that fit the actual needs of the people involved.
How Family Therapy Helps
Family therapy can help your family:
Understand the patterns that keep repeating
Communicate with less defensiveness and more clarity
Reduce conflict and emotional escalation
Strengthen parent-child or caregiver-child relationships
Navigate divorce, separation, co-parenting, or blended family dynamics
Support children and teens through anxiety, depression, ADHD, grief, or major transitions
Create or identify shared values and outcomes Understand the different experiences of each family member
Build healthier boundaries and expectations
Repair trust after hurt, disconnection, or rupture
Make room for cultural, identity-based, and generational differences
Create a more emotionally safe family environment
Our Approach to Family Therapy
At MFSP, we approach family therapy with warmth, directness, and respect for every person in the room. We understand that families are systems. When one person is struggling, the whole system often feels the impact. When the system changes, each person has more room to heal, grow, and relate differently.
Our therapists may draw from family systems therapy, attachment-based work, CBT, narrative therapy, somatic and mindfulness approaches, trauma-informed care, and emotionally focused approaches. The specific work depends on your family’s goals, the ages of the people involved, and what feels most useful clinically.
We pay attention to the deeper context around your family, including culture, identity, gender, sexuality, race, socioeconomic stress, grief, trauma, neurodivergence, and the pressures of daily life. Therapy should help your family understand itself more clearly—not force everyone into one narrow definition of what a family “should” look like.
Is Family Therapy Right for Us?
Family therapy may be a good fit if your family is experiencing:
Frequent conflict or communication breakdowns
Parent-child or parent-teen disconnection
Difficulty setting or respecting boundaries
Parenting stress or caregiver burnout
Divorce, separation, co-parenting, or blended family challenges
Grief, illness, trauma, or major life changes
ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression, or emotional regulation concerns within the family
Repeating patterns that feel hard to interrupt
A desire to repair, reconnect, or better understand one another
Begin Your Therapy Experience with Us
You do not need to wait until things feel unmanageable. Family therapy can help when your family feels stuck, but it can also help when you want more tools, more clarity, and more support. Family therapy can be preventative whenever possible.
GETTING HERE
Location:
Our office is located in the Sellwood neighborhood of Southeast Portland at 8083 SE 13th Ave, Suites 2 & 4. Your therapist will specify which suite they are in. Come on upstairs to the second floor, but please keep in mind we are not ADA accessible.
Parking:
There is plenty of free street parking in front of the building as well as in the lot in the back of the building, just behind OnPoint Credit Union (13th and Tacoma St). Park in a spot NOT labeled OnPoint Credit Union and walk up the stairs at the back of the building. Find your Suite: 2 or 4.
Public Transport:
From downtown
Take the southbound #40 bus towards Tacoma, get off at SE Tacoma & 13th, or
Take the southbound MAX orange line towards Milwaukie, get off at SE Bybee Blvd and transfer to the northbound #40 bus towards Swan Island. Get off at SE Tacoma & 13th.
From Concordia, Grant Park, Buckman, Hosford-Abernathy, etc.
Take the southbound #70 bus towards Milwaukie, get off at SE 17th & Tacoma. Walk four blocks west to SE 13th & Tacoma.
From anywhere else:
Google Maps can provide useful routes that include bus schedules.
By Bike:
From anywhere along the Willamette
Take the Willamette Greenway Trail along the river to the Sellwood Bridge, cross the bridge and take Tacoma St to SE Tacoma & 13th.
Take the Springwater on the Willamette, turn off and take Spokane St to Spokane & 13th.
From anywhere else
There are many neighborhood greenways and bike paths that link up in Sellwood. Google Maps can give specific directions. Here are instructions for how to enable the biking paths layer.