Your forty-hour workweek has been taking sixty hours of your life every week for the last six months

Your forty-hour workweek has been taking sixty hours of your life every week for the last six months. You missed your son's first baseball game and your daughter's last three tennis matches. You're up for a promotion and honestly can't imagine how you can take the increased pressure for any amount of money. You also can't handle the idea of missing any more time with your family. On top of everything, you just don't know how to talk to them about this. You've considered family counseling, but can't figure out when you'll find the time.

Above and beyond the usual teenage angst and pressure, you have a workaholic mom and a dad who seems to think his daughter should pick up the household slack like it's the 1950s not the twenty-first century. You are struggling in calculus and freaked out about the SATs and worried whether your parents will approve of your otherwise squeaky clean, fantastic boyfriend if they find out you met him at the college party they forbid you to attend. With everyone so busy, you have no clue how to add your stresses to theirs. Your best friend's family went for counseling, but only because her brother got caught with pot in his backpack.

You always believed that your family unit would act as a unit and pull together in bad times and celebrate together in good. These days it seems like everyone is on edge, including you. Even your son's home run and daughter's winning straight sets don't dispel everyone's worries through the end of dinner, much less the whole evening. Weekends are now all about catching up on things from last week's To Do list instead of the backyard barbeques and college football that used to make every Saturday a pretty good day. Still, it's hard to complain when all of you are trying to do your personal best every single day. You've heard of family counseling but figure that's just for parents and kids going through a divorce.

Although family counseling is well known for assisting families in emergent crisis or finding their way through the aftermath of a shocking blow, it is an excellent resource for families facing tough times in the midst of tough times. Communication can be difficult across gender and generations. The stresses and pressures of work, school, home and any attempt at a social life can and do make it difficult for parents and children and young adults to maintain a sense of equilibrium, personally or as part of a strong bond with immediate relatives.

The decision to reach outside of the home you share for help recalibrating the shared lives inside your home can be its own first step toward reconnecting as a unit. Family counseling is there to help each person to be heard. From there, the group of people with shared genetic coding can better understand one another and discover new and better ways to share their lives.