Reunification/
Family Repair Therapy

START HERE.

Reunification Therapy or Family Repair Therapy (or even Parent-Child Relationship Repair Therapy) is a type of therapy that often gets ordered by a Judge, agreed upon through attorneys, or decided by a Parenting Consultant. If you're here, our guess is that someone has mentioned that your family could benefit from this type of therapy.

Here's why you might be looking at this page:

1. You're in family that's separated or divorced and one or more children is having difficulty maintaining a relationship with one or both parents.

2. Someone has maybe mentioned "alienation" or "protective parenting" and you're concerned that either your relationship with your kids will be forever damaged OR that you'll be accused of interfering with your kids' relationship with their other parent.

3. Someone you care about is in the above situation.

WHO IS THIS FOR?

This type of therapy is for the following families:

1. Divorced or separated families in which there is resistance on the part of a child or children to spend time with or have contact with one of their parents.

2. Families with children younger than 17 years old.

3. Families in which both parents are ready to stop hating the other parent.

4. Families in which both parents are willing and able to implement therapist recommendations.

5. Families in which both parents can have flexible outcome expectations. This means that both parents can be satisfied with improved parent-child relationships, regardless of whether anything changes with their legal parenting time.

WHO IS THIS NOT FOR?

This type of therapy is not appropriate for the following types of families:

1. Families in which one or both parents is not willing or able to take on some responsibility to fix the situation for their children.

2. Families in which one or both parents is focused solely on increasing or decreasing parenting time.

3. Families in which there are significant barriers, such as: an out of state parent, an incarcerated parent, active physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, untreated substance use disorders, untreated severe and persistent mental health disorders, and other barriers that interfere with a parent being able to attend therapy sessions and commit to the therapy process.

4. In some cases, this process is not for families in which one or more children are nearing emancipation and who won't participate. However, if the parents are willing to participate even without the children, this process can still have benefits.

TOUCHINGTREES REQUIREMENTS FOR FAMILIES

TouchingTrees has the following requirements before deciding whether to work with a family:

1. The family MUST have a Parenting Consultant, a Special Master, or a hands-on Referee to provide accountability to the process. Therapists cannot enforce an order for therapy, so a judicial or extra-judicial professional is needed to keep the process moving forward.

2. Parents must agree to our process, expectations, and fee agreements.

3. Parents must be willing to meet together virtually, if requested. Typically, protective orders allow for joint metings with therapists.

4. Pay the administrative fee to cover file setup, initial calls with the referring professional, scheduling, and 1-2 hours of document review.

WHAT IS THIS THERAPY?

This type of therapy is a systems therapy that assesses and addresses issues in the entire family system, even if there is separation and divorce.

1. Assessment Phase.

At TouchingTrees, we always start with an assessment phase. During this phase the therapist/s meet with the parents, meet with kids, meet with the PC or possible attorneys, meet with other therapists that work with the family, read court documents, read custody/parenting plan evaluations, and read psychological and/or substance use evaluations. The therapists may require more than one parent or child meetings prior to writing the initial assessment report.

2. Assessment Report.

Our therapists then prepare an assessment report for both parents and the PC. In the report, the therapists indicate who we met with, what issues have been identified, your system's strengths, your system's possible definition of success, your system's potential barriers to achieving success, and a next-steps plan that may include recommendations of actions that need to be done prior to starting therapy.

3. First Next Steps.

Our first next steps are determined by the assessment phase. These next steps most often include working with the parents first to determine what "good enough" parenting is for the family system, and to determine and implement strategies to help both parents show up differently for your kids. Our therapists will use a variety of therapies and interventions to help get the parents to a place where it makes sense to then bring in the kids. The reason we don't start with the parents and kids together in session is that we believe that this is primarily the parents' issue to solve. Maybe one parent needs to improve attunement in order to achieve some repair and healing. Maybe, also, the other parent needs to improve boundaries and assert a different system structure in order to help the kids participate in the relationship. In our years of experience, it is never the kids' problem to solve. If a child isn't seeing another parent, we believe the parents can solve the issue and support the child if they are willing to.

4. Reassessment, Reevaluation, and Building the Next, Next Steps.

As we meet with your family, we will be constantly assessing and evaluating progress and readiness to move forward to next, next steps.

5. Ending Services.

Reunification/Family Repair Therapy can end in a variety of ways. Our hope is that it ends because the goals have been met, and there is enough repair in the parent-child relationship (or the parent-parent conflict) that you no longer need us. Other reasons it ends:

One or both parents become impatient, untrusting of the process, or resistant to participation. We know the signs of these things and will name them if we see them.
One or both parents files significant litigation that will negatively impact (or completely derail) the therapy process. We reserve the right to determine if we think ongoing litigation will make our work too difficult to continue, and we will notify attorneys or a PC if we believe this has happened.
There are other issues that preclude us being able to move forward. This can be mental health or substance use crises or other unforeseen circumstances.
Sometimes children suffer detrimental secondary distress when they are forced into legal or therapeutic processes and we will end services for a child who is in such distress.

WHAT WORKS

Over time, we've learned what makes the family therapy process work well. Here are a few of those things:

1. Having realistic expectations of the process. We tell all our families that we are working for success now and, if that isn't possible, then the opportunity for success later. Your kids are at developmental stages where they don't necessarily understand the long-term implications of a ruptured relationship with a parent. If it starts to be clear that we can't make enough progress now for full repair and connection to occur, then we also want to leave the door wide open for that repair and connection to happen once your child has developed a little more.

2. Communicating honestly and vulnerably with the therapists. We can't help you with what we don't know about. And we want to help you!

3. Allowing yourself to have a tiny bit of skeptical trust for the process AND the other parent. You don't have to forgive and forget, nor do you have to trust the other parent with your bank account numbers, but it helps a ton if you can assume something less negative about their intentions. We therapists will know if a parent is hiding their intentions or being less than forthcoming. Let us worry about that while you work toward giving slightly more positive benefits of doubts.

CAUTIONS:

1. This therapy is expensive and time consuming. You should plan for a minimum of 6 months to 3 years in order to achieve success of some form. Our rates are a minimum of $210-$240/hour and we require some amount of deposit or admin fee ahead of time.

2. The likelihood of success is solely dependent on you parents. The families we've seen make repair and reconnection are ones where both parents are committed enough to the idea that kids benefit from relationships with both parents, even if one or both parents is only "good enough" or maybe not quite there yet. We haven't yet worked with a family where there wasn't success when BOTH parents were intentional and focused on the kids and their relationships with the other parent. Conversely, the families that don't achieve success miss out because one or both parents isn't able to support the kids in the ways the kids need or detach from a negative narrative about the other parent.

BEFORE YOU CONSIDER WORKING WITH US, THINGS TO KNOW:

1. Our openings are few and far between because we work closely with families for the first few months.

2. There are things you can do before or besides meeting with us that will help you and your kids. These are:

Take Jenni's High Conflict Relationship Course, found HERE. This course will help you understand the dynamics you're in and how YOU can make changes that will change the patterns.
Take the New Ways for Families courses for coparents or families where there are resist-refuse dynamics, found HERE.
Attend and take seriously parent coaching sessions (even if it's with one of our providers). It only takes ONE of you to make changes to the system that can benefit the kids.

3. All of our therapists WANT your family to feel better, and we especially want your children to be able to move into adulthood with more security and less instability. The ripple benefits of even one child feeling more secure in their family of origin are tremendous.

Let’s Work Together

Get in touch so we can start working together.

Reunification/ Family Repair Therapy