Family
Counselling
When something is difficult inside a family, it is rarely one person's fault. Usually a pattern has jammed — and patterns are unjammed by whoever is willing to move.
The family as a system
In a family, no behaviour happens in a vacuum. The child who shuts the bedroom door, the parent who shouts, the teenager who says nothing: all are moves within a system trying to balance itself. Which is why the question "what is wrong with him?" usually leads nowhere, while "what does this behaviour do in here?" opens a way through.
The work focuses on communication patterns, on the roles each person has taken on — often without choosing them — on the boundaries between generations, and on the stories the family tells about itself.
Common requests
- Parent–teenager conflict: rules, screens, curfews, autonomy.
- Parent counselling: when the request concerns the child but the most substantial work happens with the parents.
- Divorce and co-parenting: how to talk to the child, how to keep a working parental partnership after the relationship ends.
- Blended families: new partners, step-siblings, roles that need defining from the start.
- Adult children and parents: boundaries, guilt, financial or emotional dependence.
- Caring for an ageing parent: carer strain, sharing the load between siblings, grief before the loss.
- Chronic illness in the family: how everyone reorganises around it.
Who comes to sessions
Not everyone needs to come every time — and often it is not advisable. The first meeting is usually with the adults who bring the request; from there we decide together which composition serves best: the parents alone, the whole family, or an alternation.
Where the request concerns a minor, working with the parents is almost always the most effective point of intervention: the child returns home after every session, and if home does not move, change rarely holds.
At a glance
- ForParents, families, adult siblings
- Duration50 minutes per session
- SettingAt the practice in central Thessaloniki, or online
- ApproachCognitive behavioural (CBT) with EFT elements
- AppointmentsBy phone or through the contact form
- Who attendsDecided after the first assessment meeting
Frequently asked questions
It helps a great deal, but it is not a precondition for starting. Even when only one parent moves, the system changes — just more slowly. In the first meeting we will look at what is feasible in your situation.
Very common, particularly in adolescence. We do not push: we start with you. Parent counselling changes the context the child actually lives in and that is often enough. If they later want to come, they will come because they chose to — which is the only useful starting point anyway.
The work is structured precisely so that does not happen. A session is not a space for free venting: there is a framework, there is an order, and there is someone who stops the conversation when it stops being productive. That does not happen in the living room — which is why the same conversations there always end in the same place.
No. The therapeutic role and the expert witness role are incompatible: nobody can be both the person you trust and the person who testifies about you. No reports are prepared for legal use.