Family Life Counseling Center

01/25/2026

We are honored to have been given the title “BEST COUNSELING PRACTICE” in LAKELAND by Google!! We received this in July 2025, but somehow we missed the email and they sent us a mailed letter to confirm we were notified.

Our therapists in Lakeland and all of our locations are committed to seeing their communities’ lives changed and healed!

**Google reviews are the best compliments for our therapists!**

01/24/2026

01/19/2026

Today, may we honor Dr Martin Luther King Jr by living in peace, treating others w respect and love and learning to understand those who are different than ourselves.

I am grateful to the work that he did, so that we can all work together, live together and heal together in therapy - regardless of the color of our skin, our cultural background or our financial status.

01/16/2026

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Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s what you do with it. You pick it up, tuck it under your arm, and keep going anyway. Fear and courage are companions. They always travel together.

01/14/2026

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Marriage will expose what you never realized you were carrying.

The way you shut down.
The way you raise your voice.
The way you avoid hard conversations.
The way you learned to protect yourself instead of letting someone get close.

Most of us didn’t grow up watching healthy communication. We learned silence, sarcasm, walking away, or brushing things under the rug. And then we bring those patterns into marriage without even realizing it.

A strong marriage doesn’t pretend those patterns don’t exist.
It has the courage to unlearn them.

To pause instead of react.
To listen instead of dismiss.
To choose understanding over being right.

Unlearning is uncomfortable. It requires humility. It asks you to look inward instead of pointing fingers.

But when two people are willing to do that work, love deepens. Safety grows. Connection changes.

Marriage isn’t about perfection.
It’s about becoming better together.

🤍🤍🤍

01/10/2026

This is what we will be teaching and allowing couples to practice throughout the Rekindle Conference Feb 28-March 1st. Deepen your connection!

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A powerful shift is changing how we see conflict in couples therapy.

Partners aren’t fighting each other, they’re fighting for closeness they don’t yet know how to reach.

Every protest carries a longing.
Every escalation protects something tender.
Every shutdown guards a fear of not mattering.

When conflict is reframed as disconnection, not aggression, blame softens and curiosity opens the space for repair.

This is where real transformation begins.

What’s shifted the way you work with conflict lately?

01/07/2026

Celebrating 3 King’s Day with you!

01/07/2026

We are excited to share that we are hosting the Rekindle Marriage Conference again! As Coco & Kevin Kowal bring us the Imago Relational techniques on communication & reconnecting, there will be laughter & tears. We will also have SAK Comedy Club and a 4-String Quartet to end each night.

Fri, Feb 27 - Sun, March 1st.
Fri: 6-9pm
Sat: 10am-8pm
Sun: 1-5pm

Venue: New Wave Christian Church
202 Hatteras Ave
Clermont, FL 34711

Cost: $350 for 12hrs of Professional Marriage Experts training on a World-renowned way of doing Imago communication with your spouse.

Rekindle your marriage - grow stronger together in love & shared experiences.

https://new-wave.churchcenter.com/registrations/events/3367732

12/31/2025

As we enter 2026, we want you to know we care and we have therapists who are seeking to come right alongside you thru your journey.

12/21/2025

So much was going on for me in this pic. I was 12. I was doing drugs and drinking. I was being exploited and r***d. I thought it was all totally normal. Cool even.

Delayed onset trauma is where we only become traumatised once we process and recognise what has happened, and can happen years/decades later.

It’s completely normal and very common for women and girls in abuse. You often don’t even know what you are being subjected to, and if it is normalised, minimised, or even glorified, you might not have any specific trauma responses whilst it is happening to you, it all comes later on.

This means you can ‘appear’ to be ‘coping’ or ‘unaffected’ by whatever it is that is being done to you in the moment, but you can later on process and reprocess what was really happening, and then become distressed, traumatised and feel totally crushed by it all.

This journey of processing your own trauma can come at any point in your life, and it can happen over and over again.

A trauma informed anti-pathology approach to this is vital - because this is totally normal. This is not mental illness. This is not a disorder. You can be retriggered and need to keep reprocessing for years, and it’s natural.

Interestingly, the international research on child sexual abuse and exploitation actually shows that the majority of kids being abused will use ‘positive’ coping mechanisms like working harder at school, trying to be ‘good’, being quiet, engaging in sports etc - which means no one notices!

We only get taught that children being abused show ‘negative’ coping mechanisms - but these are actually comparatively rare. It’s much more common for kids to normalise abuse and cope with it by just conforming, or by seeking positive affirmation and validation at school and home.

So if you have even an *inkling* that a child around you is going through something, don’t expect or wait for ‘negative’ coping mechanisms, behaviours, or disclosures - they might not come for decades.

And if any of this applies to you - remember that delayed onset trauma is natural, very common and completely rational. This is not something to pathologise or diagnose.

All my love,

Jess x

12/20/2025

https://www.instagram.com/p/DSFlYmBDVSH/?igsh=MnpieWJsMGptcjNs