About Jill Edelman, M.S.W., L.C.S.W.
Specialist in Individual and Couples Therapy
Hello. I’m Jill Edelman, and, counting clinical practice, training and education I’ve been a therapist for over four decades.
My practice focus is on couples therapy which draws on my skills and experience working with individuals and couples with a wide range of issues. Some of the problems presented to me have included significant child-parent strains, divorcing parents, step-family adjustments, post-divorce parenting, mid-life confusion, loss of a family member, betrayal and affairs, children and gender orientation, same-sex relationships, gay and lesbian adult children, dealing with mental illness, cultural differences, special needs parenting and the impact of extended family members and family business on a couple’s relationship.
As a parent of a special needs adult, I experience daily the complexities and joys of that role.
After three decades of professional experience as a licensed clinical social worker, M.S.W., psychotherapist and couples therapist, trained in psychoanalysis, family systems and couples therapy, I have developed an approach to individual and couples work that utilizes deep listening skills melded together with strategic and problem solving techniques.
My philosophy, garnered from decades of study and careful listening to clients, provides a collaborative approach wherein the couple and the therapist work as a team of three to unravel the injurious patterns of behavior in the relationship, understand the historic roots and, by doing so, reduce the shame that is often lying beneath the surface behaviors.
By normalizing and humanizing underlying feelings, clients feel safer sharing with each other. They experience emotional parity in the relationship and recognize that greater than the need to be right is the need to be honest and close.
Other family members or extended network, who may at times be a crucial part of the couple’s recovery, will be invited by the couple to come in as well. However, the work is primarily to build a strong bond between the partners.
Over time, as the anger and hurt subside, couples become friends and intimates again. This new found or rediscovered delight in each other can last a lifetime.
My goal has been to paint a picture in prose for parents of adult special needs to view as useful model for their journey. Each state has its own confusing process, each adult child their own set of challenges and abilities, each parental body, their unique gifts and opportunities. Some folks do not need government funding. Others have children who do not readily qualify for government funding, yet clearly are ill-equiped to live on their own. Whatever the composition of your child’s patchwork quilt of adult special needs living, perhaps this blog can be of help. Fingers crossed all our special children will arrive at a place of safety and fulfillment in adulthood. That is the wish; that is the work.