Thomas Macalik, LPC

Clients I work with:  Adult individuals, children aged 0 to 10 and their families, teen and their families, and parents.

Issues I work with: Anxiety, depression, parenting strategies, emotional regulation, coping skills, communication skills, loss and grief, life transitions, self-worth, trust, attachment, defiance, behavioral concerns, school issues, and chronic pain/illnesses.

 

My Approach

As a child and family therapist and father of three young daughters, I deeply understand the journey of parenthood. While this experience is incredibly rewarding, it is also paved with unique challenges, moments of overwhelm, and points of pain. I know that parents today navigate a complex landscape of stressors, from the everyday demands of raising children, work, and managing a household to deeper anxieties surrounding their child’s well-being, development, and their effectiveness as caregivers. I see the exhaustion, self-doubt, relational strains, and emotional toll that can accompany the constant striving to meet all the individual and collective needs of a family.

My approach acknowledges these multifaceted struggles, understanding that parents often carry the weight of societal expectations, past experiences, and the deep desire to nurture thriving children. Within this context of both immense love and inevitable struggle, I aim to connect with parents, offering a supportive space to explore these challenges and collaboratively build pathways towards greater understanding, resilience, connection, and joy in their parenting journey.

Children and Family Therapy (ages 0-10)

Using a person-centered approach to parenting prioritizes the parent/caregiver-child relationship as the primary catalyst for the child’s growth and well-being. Parenting then becomes more about being a supportive companion on their child’s journey of development, trusting in their innate potential, and fostering an environment where they feel empowered to become their authentic selves.

Through empathy, authenticity, and attunement, this child-centered parenting perspective views the child as inherently capable and striving towards growth and self-actualization. Children can help us know what they need, particularly through the medium of play, and I serve as the subtitles or interpreter, as well as a guide, to help parents understand and respond to these needs.

By creating a safe and non-judgmental environment, parents support their child to experience increased self-esteem and self-worth, greater emotional regulation skills, enhanced autonomy and resilience, improved communication and relationship building, as well as a closer and more connected child-parent bond. Along the way, you develop a working internal model of your child’s unique strengths, needs, uniqueness, and vulnerabilities that can be leaned upon long after therapy has ended.

When meeting with a family for the first time, I utilize a strengths-based approach to learn what is working, where connection comes naturally, and where you are already experiencing moments of calm and clarity. I find that humans are our own worst critics, and we are vulnerable to focusing on our moments of conflict or miss. Please know your struggles, fears, and vulnerability are most welcome here. We may laugh together, we may cry together, and I think the best part of therapy is focusing on what I believe we are put on this earth to do: to be in relationship with one another and find growth, security, and healing with the people we love the most.

It is important you know I see you as the expert on your child,  and I view myself as offering expertise in the process of creating individual and relational change. When we choose to work together in family therapy, we are always working as a team with the shared goal of helping your family get exactly what each person needs.

I hope to offer a place of hope and resourcing through a non-judgmental and easy-going therapeutic relationship, a good sense of humor, and finding different ways to think about certain issues, problems, and challenges. My goal is to help you discover what works best for you and your family. I know family therapy is a vulnerable place to be, and I hope to earn your trust and safety along the way as we build new tools and maps for connection.

Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) (ages 2 to teens)

I am trained in a form of filial therapy called Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT), which offers parents/caregivers opportunities to find a way to connect with their child/children through learning the basic skills of a play therapist. As a Registered Play Therapist and Play Therapy Supervisor, I have had the privilege of learning and working with hundreds of children and their families across thousands of sessions to share my knowledge and help you scaffold new tools that work for each individual parent, caregiver, and child.

This model can be adapted for the needs of teen parents to support your communication and connection through the teen years.

In these sessions, we work together to pinpoint the strengths and misses within your relationship with your child. We structure time for you and your child to find a deeper connection and bond that may have been missed, disrupted, or elusive throughout the years.

While you may feel that parenting is rewarding most of the time, it can also feel overwhelming, confusing, and frustrating, and what better way to work through those struggles than with someone who has seen and heard from countless parents in similar situations. I want to reassure you that you aren’t alone in not knowing what to do, feeling dysregulated, disconnected, or powerless, and I am here to be alongside you in getting you and your family more of what you each need.

Adult Individual Therapy & Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

In an ideal world, our early experiences of connection offer us a sense of security, accessibility, and responsiveness. Where this has been present, we are able to develop an internal sense of ourselves as lovable, worthy, and deserving of getting our needs met. But what happens when this has not been our experience, where our imperfect caregivers may not always have known how to offer this to us?

My experience is that many of us have had to find ways to adapt and survive moments of disconnect, invalidation, or criticism. This can often mean we hold beliefs about ourselves that are limiting, worry that we have to hide or minimize parts of who we are, deny certain emotions, hustle for our worth, and/or build up layers of protection.

We may find ourselves stuck in a conflict between parts of us that long for connection and belonging and parts that strive to protect us from the possibility of further pain, rejection, or disconnection. This internal conflict can frequently play out in our important relationships in ways that create conflict, distance, frustration, and confusion.

I believe in creating an experience for deeper self-exploration, healing, and compassion. My goal is to create a space of self-led and directive healing so that you can live with greater security, calm, and confidence and build more satisfying relationships.

I also offer EMDR, a brain-based model that pairs well with the person-centered philosophy and focuses on healing trauma, overwhelm, or experiences that were outside of our capacity to cope with at the time. EMDR works at the level of the limbic system, the part of our brain that processes emotions, bodily processes, memory, and threat or trauma. By working directly with this part of the brain, profound healing and a restored sense of security, regulation, and integration can be experienced.

What we know about trauma is that it tends to get stuck in the limbic system and hold a certain emotional charge. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, or eye movement, to gently nudge the charge away from that trauma and support innermost healing by finishing the processing of those emotions. The best part is… YOU are in control of what is shared and experienced, and you are healing yourself from the inside out.

My Background

I graduated with my Master of Science in Counseling at the University of North Texas in Denton’s Counseling Center for Play Therapy, and hold a Bachelor of Science in Human Development and Family Sciences with a subspecialty in Early Childhood Development from The University of Texas at Austin. I have been practicing child and family therapy for over 10 years.

For the duration of my child and family counseling practice, I have experience working in non-profits, Children Advocacy Centers, faith-based practices, community centers, and a major children’s hospital, working with children of chronic illness and chronic pain. My joy in life is sharing parenting expertise with the families I meet, and I hope that shines through in my writing and when I meet with you.