Services — Couples, Family & Teen Therapy

Couples, Family & Teen Therapy — Telehealth in Washington State

Systems-based couples counseling, family therapy, and teen therapy for clients across Washington. Delivered by secure video with Heinz Malon, LMFT, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Child Mental Health Specialist with 31 years of experience.

Couples, Family & Teen Therapy

Couples Counseling

Couples work is a significant part of my practice. When two people who love each other have gotten to a place where they’re not speaking, or only speaking past each other, or living as polite roommates, it’s easy to conclude that something is fundamentally wrong. Usually something isn’t fundamentally wrong — the system you built together stopped working, and you haven’t had the time, the tools, or the shared bandwidth to design a new one. My MFT training is specifically in the kind of systems-based work that helps couples interrupt unhelpful patterns, repair ruptures, and build new agreements that fit who you actually are now.

I’m comfortable working with newlyweds, long-married couples, couples navigating infidelity or rupture, couples reintegrating after deployment, blended-family couples, and queer couples. LGBTQ+ couples are explicitly welcomed and affirmed.

Family Therapy

Families don’t fall apart because anyone is bad. They fall apart — or get stuck, or go quiet, or start shouting — because the systems they’re running on stopped working, and nobody has had the time or the bandwidth to design new ones.

Family therapy is where we slow down, find the patterns, and begin building something that fits the people in the room. My MFT training is specifically in this kind of systems work — seeing the family not as a collection of individual problems but as an ecosystem that we should work to maintain.

Teen Therapy (Ages 12–18)

Teen work is its own particular art. I’m a Child Mental Health Specialist (CMHS), which means I’ve been specifically trained to work with adolescents — an age group that is often harder to engage in traditional therapy because they can smell a lecture from three miles off.

My approach with teens is to take them seriously as the nearly-adults they are, to be curious about their actual life rather than the version their parents describe, and to make the sessions feel less like an appointment with a school counselor and more like a conversation with someone who is genuinely interested in how they’re doing. Telehealth is often a gift with teens. They open up more readily from their own bedrooms than from a therapist’s office.

Couples, family & teen issues I commonly work with:

Couples stuck in the same loop or living as roommates after years together
Couples navigating infidelity, loss of trust, or the work of repair
Couples reintegrating after deployment or long separations
Teenagers navigating anxiety, depression, school stress, or social difficulties
Parent-teen conflict that has gotten stuck in the same loop
Teens questioning identity, sexuality, or gender (LGBTQ+ affirming — this is a safe space)
Families blending after divorce, remarriage, or the addition of step-siblings
Families grieving a death, a loss, or a major disruption
Couples and families working through military reintegration
Communication breakdowns between partners or between parents and teens
Parenting through crisis — mental health, substance use, academic collapse, behavioral issues

How sessions typically work:

Some sessions include the whole couple or the whole family. Others include just one or two people at a time — the configuration follows the work. For teen clients, I’m transparent with both the teen and the parents about what’s confidential and what isn’t. Teens need to know I won’t report routine things back to their parents, and parents need to know I will tell them about safety concerns. That transparency up front makes the work go much better.

Couples and family therapy is often shorter than people expect. Sometimes six to ten sessions is enough to reset a system. Other times we stay longer. Either way, my goal is always to work myself out of a job — to help you build the tools and patterns you’ll use long after we’ve wrapped up.

The fact that your family, or your marriage, is struggling is not evidence that it's broken. It's evidence that it's made of humans. Let's see what we can build together.

If You're a Parent Researching This For Your Teen

I know this is probably not how you pictured your Saturday night — reading a therapist’s website trying to figure out whether to make the call. A few things that might help:

01

It’s okay that your teen doesn’t want to come. Most teens don’t, at first. Reluctance is not evidence that therapy won’t work.

02

We’ll have an initial conversation with you (the parent) to understand your concerns. Then, if we move forward, the sessions themselves are with your teen. Parents are brought in strategically — not locked out, not overexposed.

03

I’ll be clear with your teen about what’s confidential. I’ll also be clear with you about when I’d need to break that confidence (safety concerns). That clarity upfront is what builds the trust that makes teen therapy actually work.

04

For many teens, especially those with social anxiety or school avoidance, telehealth is dramatically less intimidating than an in-person office.

If you’d like to talk through whether this might be a fit for your kid, give me a call.
We’ll start there, no commitment.

Why These Tools, and Why Me

Ready to Try Talking Together?

Couples and family consultations run 30 to 60 minutes and give us a chance to see whether this will work for your system — before anyone commits to ongoing sessions.

What This Service Can't Do

Therapy works best when the match is right — both between you and me, and between you and the format. A few things I’m not the right provider for:

Active psychiatric crisis (please call 988 or 911 — telehealth is not an emergency service)
Severe active substance-use disorders requiring detox or intensive outpatient care
Eating disorders requiring medical monitoring or higher levels of care
Psychological evaluations, custody evaluations, or forensic assessment
Children under 12 (my training and focus is 12 and up)

If we talk and I’m not the right fit for what you need, I’ll say so. And I’ll do my best to help you find someone who is.

Other Ways I Can Help

Individual Therapy

For adults working through anxiety, depression, grief, life transitions, and meaning.

Trauma Therapy & EMDR

Evidence-based trauma treatment using EMDR, mindfulness, and nervous-system work.

Veterans & Military Family Counseling

For service members, veterans, spouses, and military kids. Tricare-paneled.

Ready to Find Out More?

The first step is a fifteen-minute call — or a 30-to-60-minute free consultation, if you’d prefer something more in-depth. Either way, there’s no commitment and no pressure.