About Us

A New Vision of Therapy.
Our Family/Community paradigm is garnering attention throughout the country and around the world. The Institute for Family Services offers an innovative and proven approach to a wide range of couples, family and child-centered problems. This model of therapeutic intervention provides specific strategies, for making pertinent changes in personal and family issues. In directly confronting broader social pressures, such as the loss of community, civic values, the fracturing of family life, gender norms, religious and community norms and the demands of the workplace – family members make a connection between their personal dilemmas and the negative impacts of societal patterns and cultural values. Services not only include the expertise of IFS therapists, but contributions from a diverse clientele made up of people (dentists, lawyers, corporate executives, sanitation workers, home-makers, physical therapists, mothers, fathers, grandparents, teachers) whose social capital provides enormous resources in addition to buffering families against isolation.

IFS is one of the few programs, on a state-wide and nation-wide level, that provides comprehensive, safe and integrated services to entire families, when presented with domestic violence.

Our Philosophy
To embrace the resilience that all families and individuals bring to therapy and create a landscape of strength toward resolving life’s struggles. We do not define our clients by the particular identity of their presenting problems but rather by their multiple and complex identities: their wholeness.
What makes the Institute's approach so visionary? The Cultural Context Model. Our focus is linking people across family boundaries to solve common problems. Personal and relational problems are situated in broader social issues to form a healing context. The change we seek is not only adaptive change in private life -- change that makes people more contented but does not challenge power hierarchies specifically or issues of oppression. Instead, the change we seek is an effort directed toward human and social justice.

How We Differ From Other Family Therapists
The Cultural Context Model is a mixture of therapy and social learning. IFS employs social education with an innovative use of the media, culture circles, and community sponsorship. Sponsors are men, women and adolescents who have had transformative experiences with this approach and mentor new clients.

Because IFS therapists work as a team, clients receive the same high-quality treatment, regardless of their ability to pay. IFS does not participate in Managed Care because Managed Care often insists on limiting the quality and scope of services. However, the Institute's services often cost no more than what a client would pay if he or she were using Managed Care.

Our Results
But what about results? Consider this. Approximately 45% of IFS's clientele are families with problems of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and addictions. Even so, in over 21 years only two clients have been hospitalized and less than five percent are on psychotropic medications. While loss and trauma destroys many families, our families are embraced at their most vulnerable points, propelling them into powerful life-activating choices.

If you would like to learn more about working with the Institute for Family Services,
please call us at 732-873-1663 or e-mail us at WeCare4UIFS@aol.com.

Institute for Family Services, 3 Clyde Road, Suite 101, Somerset, NJ 08873