ADOLESCENT  :   PARENTING  :   INDIVIDUAL  :   FAMILY
COACHING  :   EDUCATIONAL CONSULTING  :   CLASSES
Adolescent

At the Pacific Wellness Center our work with adolescents is focused on developing essential life skills necessary for successful transition to adulthood. These skills include effective communication, healthy peer, partner and family relationships, and setting and implementation of goals.

The Wellness Center can offer adolescents and their families the following support and expertise in negotiating this difficult stage of life:

• Reduce painful symptoms related to depression, bi-polar, learning disorders and low self-esteem.
• Help adolescents better understand and think through cause and effect relationships to develop their problem-solving skills.
• Help students learn and practice stress-reduction techniques to combat the overwhelming levels of stress that result from intense academic and social pressures.
• Increase self-esteem through a realistic assessment of strengths and weaknesses.
• Increase repertoire of healthy coping mechanisms, which decreases the likelihood of using negative coping skills such as self-medicating with drugs, alcohol, or sexual acting out.
• Help teens and parents work through issues of trust, responsibility, and independence to support adolescents in a safe, healthy, and successful transition to adulthood.
• Help families work through the developmental struggle for independence by teaching teens and parents negotiation and conflict resolution skills.
• Improve communication between teens and parents by uncovering hidden worries, concerns and fears and reframing them in a way that allows them to be brought to light and dealt with directly.
• Help teens and parents create and agree on realistic goals, as well as develop short and long term steps to realizing these goals.

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Parenting

Most of us want to be perfect parents for our children, always knowing the right thing to say or do in any given situation. Unfortunately, many of us are stuck with having to learn and develop our parenting skills as we go from crisis to crisis.

As your children grow through the different stages of development, your repertoire of tools and techniques must grow and change with them. Each child is different and the effective tools that you manage to develop with one child may not work in the same way with his or her siblings. Parenting books and TV shows often give generic advice that may not apply, or is not feasible to enact in your family. As a result, many parents often feel exhausted, isolated, ineffectual and sometimes even hopeless.

At the Pacific Wellness Center, we can offer you the following support to help you develop the skills and tools you need to effectively parent your children:

• Help you hone the innate parenting instincts and skills you already possess and learn to develop new ones that will be effective with your child in the context of your family.
• Work with you to help target specific areas in need of change and to develop a customized parenting plan based on your needs and abilities.
• Foster your ability to support your child emotionally and create a life-long bond of trust and acceptance.
• Help you understand the social, educational, cultural, and community context in which your child is operating when making decisions.
• Create a behavioral support plan that you can enact at home followed by a series of follow-up sessions to monitor progress.
• Consult with teachers and other school personnel to create a plan that addresses your child's needs both at home and at school.
• Enable you to negotiate the educational system and work collaboratively with teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators to determine the best approach for your child.
• Help you learn and practice self-care and stress-reducing techniques and other positive coping skills to replace negative ones, such as self-medicating with drugs, alcohol, food, etc.

Your family has unique strengths and weaknesses, rules, expectations and values. Our approach ensures that as we develop the parenting plan together, we look not only at the resources and challenges within your family, but also within the greater community.

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Individual

Taking the step to seek professional help for life problems takes tremendous courage. At the Pacific Wellness Center we recognize how difficult it can be to take the leap of faith necessary to trust a virtual stranger with the most personal and often most painful areas of your life.

Our philosophy of therapy is based on the idea that you are the expert on your life, and you will be the one to decide how therapy will work for you. We will work in collaboration with you to:

• Reduce painful symptoms related to depression, bi-polar, learning disorders and low self-esteem.
• Learn and practice healthy, appropriate communication and social skills to build healthy relationships, learn to work with difficult people when necessary, and effectively evaluate the quality of your current relationships.
• Eliminate negative coping skills such as addictive behaviors.
• Help you learn and explore new positive coping methods and life skills.
• Help you evaluate your social and community resources as vital tools in realizing your ideal life.
• Develop treatment goals and create a plan to achieve them, incorporating strategies uniquely fitted to your needs and lifestyle.
• Assess and reassess this plan throughout the course of therapy as you begin to develop and practice new skills. Some will work for you and others will be less successful. Together, we will continually evaluate the effectiveness of our treatment plan and will focus on those ideas and practices that work best for you until your goals have been achieved.

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Family

Rather than identifying one particular member as "the problem", family therapy looks at the family as a complete system. A family is more than just the sum of its parts. In family therapy we seek to assess and treat the needs of the family as a whole. Essentially, this means that when something, positive or negative, happens to affect one member of the family, it affects not only each of the other members, but also the overall functioning of the family.

Our approach to family therapy at the Pacific Wellness Center:

• Allows the entire family to participate in identifying what changes they would like to make, which gives all members a greater incentive to be part of the process.
• Provides multiple opportunities for members of the family to change the way they function within the family system. Ideally, this can create dramatic results in a much shorter time.
• Enables each member's unique contributions to be recognized and optimized.
• Ensures that we work with your family to assess the strengths and needs of each of its members. We then determine together how best to use your individual and family strengths to accomplish the changes needed to ensure a healthy and productive family system.
• We work with you as a unit to improve communication and negotiation skills throughout the family to create an immediate change in the way problems are resolved within the family.
• Enables all family members to work together to make changes, instead of having only one family member learning and implementing new skills. The effects of these efforts increase exponentially as these changes are reflected throughout the system.
• As with all therapy at the Wellness Center, we will continually evaluate the course of treatment and will make necessary adjustments as we learn more about what works for you and your family.

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Coaching

Coaching is defined as "facilitating people in their commitment and enthusiasm to accomplish their objectives". It targets very specific problems, which usually translates to faster results with a smaller expenditure of time and money. At the Pacific Wellness Center, coaching may be done either in person or over the phone. If you choose to utilize phone and email coaching, you have increased flexibility to work when and where it is most convenient for you.

The process of coaching is action-oriented, and solution-focused. You determine the desired change, and we work together to create a specific plan to accomplish this change, and to provide accountability.

Coaching is not therapy. It does not seek to treat underlying emotional or mental health problems, it seeks to help you develop your full potential for personal or professional growth.

Coaching at the Pacific Wellness Center can help Teens with:

• Increasing general self-esteem.
• Creating healthy and satisfying relationships.
• Having the confidence and skills to reach your academic or life goals.
• Discovering and developing your talents.
• Creating a transition plan for young people who aren't sure what to do after high school.

Parent coaching through Pacific Wellness Center can help with:

• Improving a specific area of parenting.
• Increasing positive communication with your child.
• Finding ways to decrease stress and chaos in your life in order to be more present for your family.
• Learning how to work together with your child as a united team in realizing goals.
• Learning skills to decrease conflict in your home.

As with all services at the Pacific Wellness Center, we offer an initial free consultation to help you determine how we can best serve your needs. Once we decide together to proceed with coaching, we will set up a monthly coaching schedule. The first coaching session will probably run longer than subsequent calls, as we will be assessing your needs more thoroughly and creating a customized coaching plan.

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Educational Consulting

Watching you child struggle to succeed, or even just survive, in a school environment that doesn't seem to understand his or her needs can be extremely painful and frustrating.

At the Pacific Wellness Center, our educational consultant can guide you through the complicated and sometimes overwhelming experience of finding the best educational program for your child by:

• Assessing your child's current educational program to identify its strengths and areas of need.
• Increasing your knowledge about the range of educational services available, and helping you to evaluate which programs best meet the needs of your child.
• Providing information, community resources, and best practices regarding learning, emotional and physical disabilities.
• Working with you to determine whether your child can benefit from special education services, and walking you through the process of obtaining and implementing those services.
• Interpreting psychological and educational testing so that you have a better understanding of your child's current level of functioning, and translating that information into a concrete plan for academic success.
• Helping to develop an effective Individual Education Plan (IEP) that meets the specific needs of your child.
• Working collaboratively with school personnel and family to implement an effective educational program.

If your are concerned about your child's current educational program or academic performance, please call today for a free 30 minute initial consultation. We will work with you to determine whether your child can benefit from a more comprehensive evaluation.

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Classes

According to the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families, today's families are more heavily scheduled than ever before. Finding the time to fit in yet another commitment can seem extremely daunting to families who are already over-committed and struggling to survive from crisis to crisis.

At the Pacific Wellness Center, we are committed to helping you realize your ideals for effective parenting, individual peace and wellness, family harmony, and launching your child into the world as a successful adult.

We offer a series of problem-specific, 4-6 week classes designed to help you develop new tools and skills to address your needs in the most efficient and time-effective way possible.

Classes are presented in a small group format, usually 4-8 people per class. Class format combines basic information, experiential exercises, and the practice and implementation of new skills to target specific areas of change.

Some upcoming classes for 2008 are:

• A Busy Moms Guide to Simplifying Life
• Survival Tips for Parenting a Teenager
• Learn how to Fight: Increasing Family Harmony through Conflict Resolution and Negotiation
• Co-Parenting that Works
• Parenting for Blended Families

Please see Calendar for class specifics.

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