You may be concerned about personal issues and want to talk these over with a therapist. Job stress, anxiety, depression, coping with loss, physical or sexual abuse, unreasonable fears, stress related to health concerns, codependency, or other emotional difficulties are all problems that may be successfully addressed in individual counseling. Meeting regularly with a therapist to openly discuss your concerns helps lessen their effect on your life and improve your ability to manage the difficulty. Individual counseling encourages you to deal with your distress in constructive ways that promote greater satisfaction in your life.

Everyone lives in a family. Whether it is large or small, loving or not, families usually do the best that they can in raising and caring for their members. Sometimes what families can do is not enough.  Sometimes family relationships may even be hurtful because individuals know of no other ways to behave. The emotionally intimate relationships in many families can confuse or hurt people, but they can also be healing and healthy. Appropriate issues for family counseling include relationships, parenting, coping with loss, addiction, violence and abuse. Family counseling may be the therapeutic choice when individual or couple issues have effects beyond the individual person. The therapist can meet with the whole family together, or with any part of the family, to address these broader concerns. As your family members learn to interact differently with each other, there is hope that the issues that prompted you to seek family counseling can be openly and effectively talked about in a way that promotes change.

Group experience can be a helpful way of helping people with anger. Catholic Charities offers two groups for individuals whose experience of anger in their lives has become a problem. Therapists facilitate both groups, and group members contribute greatly to the groups’ positive effects. One group is a time-limited psycho educational group for women. The other is an ongoing, open support group for men. At Catholic Charities we believe that anger is a part of life.  It is not of itself a negative emotion, but it can lead to negative consequences in one’s life. Anger frequently serves as a mask for other powerful emotions, whether these feelings are of fear, or anxiety, or inadequacy. Anger can make enemies of friends, and it can estrange partners from one another. When not managed well, it can produce negative effects in personal and work relationships. Talking with others in one of our groups can help you to learn more effective ways of managing your anger so that it is much less of a problem in your life and relationships.