Therapy that begins with you and ripples through the relationships that shape you.
Relational, systems-based, depth therapy for families.
The system reveals itself.
The work follows.
What's passed down isn’t just material — it’s emotional, relational & spiritual.
Family therapy reveals the unspoken agreements that govern how you love and relate.
Who were you asked to be in your family?
What are the unspoken agreements that govern your relationships?
If you had a choice, would you do things differently?
Break the spell cast before you arrived.
The Contract. The Jewels. The Curse.
The roles we inherit aren’t always conscious — but they shape everything.
Do you act out the pain no one else will name
or tell the truth and then get blamed?
Did you keep the peace but lose yourself
or carry their legacy and never ask for help?
If you’re the one who makes it all okay
what price did you pay?
Are you repeating history
or did you see the pattern and break away?
Become a relational philanthropist.
Choose what you want to preserve.
Give the rest away.
Family therapy designed to recognize, disrupt, and repair outdated patterns of relating.
A systems-based approach to family therapy designed to explore the roles we inherit, the patterns we repeat, and the new possibilities that emerge when we consciously choose to relate differently.
This is family therapy that brings others into the process to support your individual healing.
An extension to one-on-one psychotherapy, family therapy expands to include your closest relations when patterns can’t be fully understood or shifted in individual work alone.
For families who want to move beyond blame and toward repair — with humor, humility, and heart.
Strengthen your family’s foundation with new ways of communicating, listening, and creating accountability.
Explore the deeper architecture of your internal family systems.
Map the core archetypes that comprise the multiplicity of each individual and locates them with respect to your siblings, parents and grandparents.
Bridging the internal and the external, we’ll ask questions like, “How does your inner child show up?” — and also, “How does your actual child show up?” Are you aware of how they relate?
Bringing these dynamics to light invites insight, connection, and healing.
Family therapy is an opportunity to shift how you show up for each other.
The health and well being of each family member is reciprocal. When one person begins to heal, the whole system benefits.
Extending individual work into relational life means that change begins with you and unfolds to include your sibling, child, or parent as the work calls for it.
For the family to thrive, each member of the family needs to heal as an individual and in relationship to the others.
Family therapy offers each voice a generous amount of space to:
Without healthy, open communication this can seem aspirational.
Exploring multiple perspectives and restoring equilibrium is crucial when the problem is expressed in the dynamic relationship between the whole and the parts. As a licensed California Marriage and Family Therapist, I can teach you the skills to:
Generational trauma repeats until consciously disrupted, showing up in the roles we inherit and the survival strategies we learn early — often without realizing it.
The symptoms can be subtle or acute.
Often, the person expressing the “problem” is not the source of the dysfunction.
It starts further back.
Shame keeps these problems buried — denied, externalized, or projected — until they surface in ways that can no longer be ignored.
Blame wants a single cause, but it’s more complicated than that.
Family dynamics are systemic — patterns shaped over time, reinforced across relationships, and carried forward without question.
Healing begins when:
Everyone’s healed until they go back home.
Even the most self-aware among us can be pulled back into old patterns.
Family therapy offers a space to notice the trigger — and respond differently.
Build a home that moves with you.
If your family is by birth or by choice, if you are new parents or the adult children of aging parents, if you are married or separated or divorced or partnered, the relationship dynamics of a complex, living and changing system have the power to nurture or destroy.
Nothing quite gets to the core of human existence as the emotions stirred by our intimate relations.
We distinguish ourselves and grow as individuals in relationship to others. By healing our relationships, we too become whole.
Marla Leigh Caplan is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in San Francisco offering family therapy throughout California.
Healing happens in relationship.
