Welcome!

I'm glad you stopped by to visit!  Feel free to come in, take off your shoes, and stay awhile.

This first post is to let you know why this site exists and why this work is so important to me and why it should be for those in the trenches doing the work with our children and families. It's all about keeping the focus on the family.

Family, no matter how it is defined (and I'll come back to that in a future post) is the reason we are here.

Family is the very beginning of our identify, our foundation of support (or lack thereof), and the unit in which we rely on most often for a variety of types of support along our life's journey in reaching developmental tasks and milestones. However, no family operates the same, times are always changing, and the developments in our healthcare, our nation, and our world continue to have an external force in how our families are shaped and function. And many, if not all, families experience periods of crises or cycles of dysfunction at some point in their life, some of which require the assistance of Behavioral Health Intervention and maybe even Residential Treatment.

There is no "normal" family. As I once heard, "...normal is a setting on a washing machine." 
There also is no manual for perfect parenting- if there was I am certain it would exist by the now.

Residential Treatment, and intensive emotional and behavioral health intervention, is designed to serve a time limited purpose along the continuum of care and service delivery. The goal is to help the family unit (however it may be defined) establish or re establish equilibrium as soon as clinically possible. This is why the FRM was created.

A guiding principal in my work with families is to normalize the fact that no matter how a family started, what strengths it does or does not have, and however a family is operating does not, and will not, define them as a unit. It is simply a piece of the thread that is used to weave the family's own unique narrative fabric. The goal in our work is to honor where they are at, where they desire to be, and help serve as a deliberate and supportive guiding light back toward safety and balance.

While many of the families that require intensive therapeutic intervention face serious and grave issues, I always try to stress to the children, families, and providers involved that a sense of hope and optimism must prevail. Dysfunction is a disruption in equilibrium or homeostasis, and any living organism or system can become unbalanced. It can become unsafe, unproductive, disorganized, and chaotic. It can become unwell, toxic, dangerous, and stuck.

We have a very critical choice to make when we work with families or when we are that family: we can choose to see all that is wrong and pass judgment and remain stuck doing the same things that do not help resolve our instability, or we can see all the opportunity that lies before us and yet to be discovered through this unique circumstance. We can choose to create a new lens for the family unit to thrive, not just survive. Crisis is both a threat and opportunity. As providers and as members of our own families, we cannot lose sight that we have the power to choose.

And so if you are working with a family who has come to the attention and need of emotional and behavioral family support and that is what has lead you here to this site, or you are that family in need of help and guidance, its critical to know that where ever you are is not where you need to stay. 
There is a path. Let me show you the way!