Adult Family Therapy in Pasadena, CA
Relationships Change On Their Own. Family Patterns Often Don’t.
You may have built a successful career, created your own family, or spent years working on yourself in therapy, yet one conversation with a parent or sibling can activate old patterns of defense, guilt, overwhelm and leave you feeling incredibly misunderstood.
Adulthood does not erase the emotional power of family.
Longstanding patterns often continue to swirl beneath the surface. Perhaps a simple disagreement over the holidays fans a longstanding argument, or a new boundary gets interpreted as a rejection. Maybe an attempt to explain your experience is heard as criticism or a request interpreted as a demand. Regardless of intention, everyone leaves the conversation feeling unheard, even when the desire for connection is still there.
We offer adult family therapy in Pasadena using Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT), as well as online family therapy throughout California.
Our aim is to help you and your family create a space to understand your patterns, slow them down, and explore new ways of relating that feel safer, more honest, and more sustainable.
When Everyone Is Grown, But The Family Still Feels Stuck
Many families are no longer navigating childhood behavior or parenting challenges. Instead, they are carrying the emotional impact of years— or decades— of cumulative shared experiences.
You may recognize your family in situations like these:
- Conversations that quickly become arguments or emotional shutdowns
- Parents and adult children struggling to understand one another
- Adult siblings repeating the same roles they held growing up
- Conflict surrounding aging parents or caregiving responsibilities
- Longstanding resentment that never seems fully addressed
- Family members trying to reconnect after years of distance or estrangement
- Relationships affected by trauma, grief, illness, or major life transitions
Often, there is still love. However, love can become obscured when it is accompanied by grief, triangulation, toxic communication, outdated roles, attachment ruptures, unmet attachment needs, disappointments, fears, burdens, and misunderstanding.
Adult Family Therapy Is Different From Parenting Therapy
At Palomares Therapy, we primarily work with adult family relationships.
Sessions may include:
- Parents and adult children
- Adult siblings
- Multigenerational families
- Multicultural families
- Blended families
- Extended family members
- Chosen family members
- Queer platonic families
Rather than focusing on behavioral management or parenting techniques, adult family therapy explores longstanding relational patterns, attachment injuries, boundaries, changing family roles, caregiving, identity, and the emotional experiences that continue shaping relationships long after childhood has ended.
Who We Support in Adult Family Therapy
Parents & Adult Children
Relationships affected by emotional distance, criticism, overinvolvement, unresolved childhood experiences, or difficulty transitioning into an adult-to-adult relationship.
Adult Siblings
Old rivalries, favoritism, unequal caregiving, inheritance concerns, historic ruptures, grief, family secrets, or years of misunderstanding.
Multigenerational Families
Families navigating differences in culture, religion, immigration experiences, gender roles, sexuality, values, and generational expectations.
Families Facing Estrangement or Low Contact
Those considering repair, cautiously reconnecting, or seeking clarity about what kind of relationship feels healthy and possible.
Families Facing Illness, Grief, or Caregiving
Conflicts involving aging parents, chronic illness, disability, medical decisions, or changing family responsibilities.
Neurodivergent
Families
Families exploring how ADHD, autism, sensory differences, executive functioning, or late diagnosis have influenced communication and relationships.
Our Approach: Emotionally Focused Family Therapy
We use Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) as the foundation of our approach when supporting families. Family conflict rarely exists because one person is simply “the problem.” Instead, families can become caught in patterns that develop over years, sometimes generations, as each person learns how to protect themselves and maintain connection within the family system. Eventually, these strategies begin interacting with one another in ways that leave everyone feeling increasingly misunderstood, defensive, hurt, or alone.
Our work focuses on understanding what happens between family members.
In EFFT, we are interested not only in what people are arguing about, but in the emotional process underneath the argument. A parent may become defensive because they hear an adult child’s pain as evidence that they have failed completely. The adult child may become more forceful because defensiveness feels like further confirmation that their experience will never be understood. A sibling may withdraw because conflict has historically felt overwhelming, while another experiences that withdrawal as indifference and pushes harder for engagement. Before long, each person’s attempt to protect themselves inadvertently reinforces the very response they fear from someone else.
Therapy helps us slow that cycle down.
Rather than staying exclusively at the level of accusation, explanation, or problem-solving, we begin to understand the more vulnerable experiences underneath each person’s position. Anger may contain grief. Criticism may be carrying a longing to finally be understood. Withdrawal may protect someone who expects that speaking honestly will only make things worse. Overfunctioning may have developed around a deeply held belief that if one person does not hold the family together, no one will.
Understanding those protective responses does not mean excusing harmful behavior or suggesting that every family member bears equal responsibility for what has happened. It allows us to become more precise about the difference between impact, intention, protection, and responsibility, so that accountability can occur without reducing the family to one villain and one injured party.
As therapy progresses, we help family members communicate with one another in ways that are often difficult to access outside the room. Instead of simply arguing about what happened, a parent may begin to hear what an experience actually meant to their adult child. An adult child may be able to express hurt without immediately having to defend the legitimacy of it. Siblings may begin to understand how differently they adapted to the same family system and why those differences have sometimes made it difficult to recognize one another’s experiences.
The goal is not perfect agreement about the past. Families often remember the same events differently, and therapy does not require us to establish one definitive family narrative. Instead, we work toward greater emotional accessibility, responsiveness, and the ability to remain present with one another when something important is at stake.
For some families, that process creates the possibility of meaningful repair and greater closeness. For others, it leads to clearer boundaries, more realistic expectations, or a different kind of adult-to-adult relationship than the one the family has historically known. What matters is creating enough safety and flexibility that the old pattern no longer has to dictate every interaction.
Family Therapy Does Not Always Mean Reconciliation
We do not begin therapy assuming every family should become close.
We do not believe forgiveness is required for healing.
We do believe that sometimes therapy leads to deeper connection.
We do believe that parents are the architects of the family system, even when their children are adults.
We also believe that sometimes it helps family members develop healthier boundaries or redefine what a sustainable relationship looks like for each unique family member.
Sometimes family therapy provides clarity that certain forms of reconciliation are not currently safe or possible.
Our goal is not to preserve relationships at any cost, but rather to help each person move toward greater honesty, accountability, emotional safety, and well-being.
Neurodivergence Can Shape the Entire Family
Sometimes what has been interpreted for years as laziness, selfishness, stubbornness, or disrespect is better understood through differences in nervous systems, communication styles, sensory processing, or executive functioning.
A late diagnosis of ADHD or autism can change how an entire family understands its history.
Greater understanding does not erase the impact that family members have experienced, but it can soften negative meaning making and fan compassion.
Adult family therapy creates a space for us to explore these dynamics.
Multicultural Family Therapy
We work with families from a wide range of cultural, racial, ethnic, and generational backgrounds, including Southeast Asian and East Asian families, Black families, Latiné families, immigrant and bicultural families, and blended multicultural family systems. We approach this work with cultural humility and curiosity, recognizing that many traditional therapy models were developed within Eurocentric frameworks and can carry assumptions about independence, emotional expression, vulnerability, and what healthy family relationships should look like.
Rather than applying one standard for closeness or communication, we stay curious about how love, loyalty, respect, obligation, intimacy, and repair are understood within your family. This is especially important in families navigating acculturation across generations, where parents and adult children may have developed in very different cultural contexts and may hold competing ideas about what connection, care, and belonging should look like.
A parent may communicate love through sacrifice, provision, responsibility, or protection, while an adult child may be longing for emotional acknowledgment, curiosity, or a different kind of openness. These differences can create distance when each person assumes the meaning of the other’s behavior is obvious.
Our work is to help make those often-unspoken rules and expectations more visible. We help family members understand the cultural and generational meanings beneath their conflicts without treating one way of relating as more evolved or correct, creating more room for flexibility, understanding, and connection.
Adult Family Therapy in Pasadena and Across California
Palomares Therapy provides adult family therapy in Pasadena for parents and adult children, adult siblings, multigenerational families, chosen families, and other adult family relationships. Our Pasadena office serves families throughout Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, Altadena, Glendale, Eagle Rock, and the greater Los Angeles area. We also offer online family therapy throughout California, which can be particularly useful when adult siblings or other family members live in different parts of the state.
You don’t have to know whether repair is possible. Many families begin therapy uncertain about what comes next.
A consultation offers an opportunity to understand what has been happening, discuss who may benefit from participating, and determine whether adult family therapy is the right fit for your family.
Frequently Asked Questions About Adult Family Therapy
Do you work with families with young children?
Palomares Therapy primarily offers family therapy for adults, including parents and adult children, adult siblings, and multigenerational families. We do not currently provide child-centered or play-based family therapy. Depending on circumstances, we may be able to offer family therapy for parents and older adolescents. During a consultation, we can help determine whether our services fit your family’s needs.
Does everyone in the family have to participate?
Not necessarily. Family therapy may begin with only two members of a larger family, such as a parent and adult child or two adult siblings. Sometimes other family members are not ready to begin the process at first, but become more open to joining once they understand what the therapy is actually trying to accomplish.
When that happens, we take care to thoughtfully integrate the new participant rather than simply adding them into an already-established therapy process. We will clarify the purpose of their involvement, discuss confidentiality and any relevant treatment boundaries, and make sure everyone understands how the structure of therapy may shift.
We will also talk together about who should participate based on the relationship being addressed, each person’s willingness, and the goals of treatment.
Will the therapist take sides?
The therapist’s role is not to declare one person the winner of a family conflict. We work to understand each person’s experience and the pattern occurring between family members. This does not mean treating all behavior as equally harmful or avoiding accountability when there have been meaningful differences in power, responsibility, or impact.
Does family therapy require forgiveness or reconciliation?
No. We do not presume that reconciliation is always safe, appropriate, or desired. Therapy may support repair and renewed closeness, but it can also help family members establish boundaries, redefine the relationship, develop realistic expectations, or determine that greater distance is necessary.
Can family therapy help after estrangement?
Sometimes. The possibility of repair depends on the reasons for the estrangement, each person’s willingness to reflect and take responsibility, current safety, and whether meaningful change is possible. Therapy can provide a structured space to explore these questions without guaranteeing a particular outcome.
Can we attend online from different locations?
We offer online adult family therapy for family members located in California. Telehealth can be especially useful for adult siblings or multigenerational families who live in different parts of the state.
Can we keep seeing our individual therapists?
Often, yes. Adult family therapy can occur alongside individual treatment when roles and boundaries are clearly defined. With appropriate written permission, we may coordinate with existing therapists when doing so would support the family work.
How long are adult family therapy sessions?
Our typical family therapy session is 50 minutes and meets weekly. For some families, particularly when several family members are participating or the conversations require more time to unfold, 50 minutes can feel constrained. We also offer 60-, 75-, and 90-minute sessions and can discuss together what length feels most appropriate for your family and the work we are doing.
Articles on the Blog
LINKS
