The NESS Counseling Center provides high quality outpatient counseling for individuals, couples and families in need regardless of their ability to pay.

If you think you, or someone you know, might need counseling, begin by calling the Center to arrange an intake meeting with the Clinical Director. This session enables the client and the Director to identify appropriate treatment needs, objectives and goals. Because The NESS Counseling Center specializes in outpatient mental health treatment, a client may not fit within the scope of the Center's mission. Therefore, the Center works closely with the client to identify appropriate referrals that will best suit their needs.

The NESS Counseling Center provides a welcoming environment to everyone regardless of race, religion, age, culture, sexual orientation or socio-economic level.

Counseling is a vehicle for dealing with problems in living. Many people feel troubled, confused, or experience painful emotions for which they seek help. Often people seek counseling because they have a vague sense that something important is missing, realize that usual styles of coping are ineffective, or are dissatisfied with the direction of their lives. Some people come to recognize that they have established a pattern of living which is harming them or those they care about. Counseling is a partnership between the client and the therapist in which they search together for an understanding of the client as a unique and valuable person.

Although the process of counseling is unique for everyone, there are some general benefits. These benefits are:

• increasing your awareness of feelings, beliefs and patterns of behavior

• developing new, more satisfying approaches to dealing with daily life

• improving self-esteem and self-image

• increasing personal and professional effectiveness

• acquiring a better understanding of past influences in your life and how they currently affect you

• improving relationship skills

• enhancing self-authority

• optimizing creativity at home and work

Couples Counseling

The NESS Counseling Center offers a supportive place where both partners feel truly heard. Couples counseling helps define and clarify issues, redirect efforts, and develop more effective relationship skills. We have a strong commitment to building on the existing strengths and resources of your relationship so that you can move toward a more satisfying mutual experience. Couples counseling offers the safe atmosphere and, often specific tools, to cultivate a more loving and creative long-term relationship.

Although counseling is a unique experience for each couple, some of the benefits are:

• understanding and appreciating how individual and family history impact your current relationship

• clarifying assumptions and expectations both partners have about each other and the relationship

• improving communication, conflict-resolution and negotiation styles

• increasing and enriching intimacy

• setting reasonable, achievable, and mutually acceptable goals for your relationship

• acquiring more effective parenting skills

• balancing work, family, relationship, and “alone” time

• having more fun together

• heightening your appreciation of what each of you brings to the relationship

• increasing mutual regard

Adolescent and Family Counseling

“Teenagers who have strong emotional attachments to their parents and to their teachersare much less likely to use drugs and alcohol, attempt suicide, engage in violence, orbecome sexually active at an early age.”

- Journal of American Medical Association, 1997


The adolescent years bring new challenges for young people and their families. The Ness Counseling Center provides counseling that is sensitive to the unique needs of teens and their parents. Counseling is an opportunity for adolescents to freely express themselves, clarify their thinking, and learn more effective life skills in a nonjudgmental atmosphere. Although counseling for adolescents does not always require family intervention, some form of parental involvement is important. We help families communicate more openly, redefine goals and expectations, and strengthen their emotional connections.

Counseling helps teens and their families:

• move through developmental milestones more consciously and mindfully

• establish healthy interpersonal boundaries

• negotiate age-appropriate expectations, rules, and standards

• keep a sense of perspective about themselves and each other

• create new ways to emotionally connect with each other

• establish more effective communication patterns

It's no new revelation that many parents lead hectic lives. It's a daily challenge to orchestrate the comings and goings, the details of the household, and maintain some personal balance for relationships when all family members are living at home. It becomes an even greater challenge when a member of the family is away from the home for a period of time because of employment, education, or military service.

The partner remaining at home is left to manage the day-to-day family and household issues. The constant transition of roles, responsibilities, and rules within the family unit contributes to the stress between partners. The most common stress is associated with what tasks are to be done, how and by whom; criticism about maintaining contact while gone; family rearrangement or reorganization of roles, routines, and rules; shifts in social support networks; jealousy regarding potential or real extramarital affairs; and disappointments over homecoming fantasies.

The stay-at-home partner assumes new roles and responsibilities when the other partner is gone for a day, a week, a month, or longer. The effect of the change on the family depends greatly upon the family's coping system. What are the particular personal resources or traits within the individuals or family members that assist in managing the daily stressors?

• The family's ability to pull together in time of need.

• How flexible they are in their decision-making and discussion.

• How organized the family is.

Each going and coming of the family member has a rollercoaster effect on the family. Initially they go through a crisis stage, then reorganize, recover, and settle into a new lifestyle pattern. This builds experiences for them to draw upon for the next departure, and gradually the adaptability helps to make transitions easier.

There are three areas of external resources for families to meet the demands of separation: (1) other family members, (2) the family system, and (3) the community. Internal resources include financial well-being, emotional and physical well-being, educational problem-solving ability, psychological resources, and self-esteem. Other factors that influence how easily a family adapts to the absent member would be individual confidence, past experiences, and the pile up and nature of stressors at any given time.

Many family members reveal that personal confidence, family support, and support from friends and community determine how easy it is to adjust to the ongoing transitions.