Matthew Chmiel, LSW, LCSW.

My ideal clients, and my main areas of training and clinical expertise, are couples and their families. I work with couples who feel truly stuck and mired in unhappy dysfunction and communication difficulties. I also work with individuals in these marriages and relationships, even when their partner is unable or unwilling to come to therapy. I offer premarital, marital, and post-marital (co-parenting) counseling. I work with everything from new couples running into communication issues, to blended families trying to establish healthy boundaries, to spouses who are about to call it quits. I help with relationships that have been beset by addiction, infidelity, the loss of a child, and other unforeseen life events. I also support partners who have difficulty aligning values, such as how to manage family finances, clarifying child-rearing and work roles, and other stressors. I help when partners have opposing views on how to reward or discipline children, or when a child’s or adolescent’s behavior, or ability to manipulate parents and other caregivers, is creating marital stress as well. I look at the dynamics of conflict between partners and how they came to be, including family-of-origin or culture-of-origin issues. Once those dynamics are identified, assessed, and prioritized, we begin working systematically to negotiate them and seek resolutions. My service delivery style is direct, nonjudgmental, empathetic, honest, and objective. It is also goal-oriented, so we can create a couples treatment plan designed to reduce conflict and relationship stress. Clients often find that with both partners’ active participation in structured couples work, getting to a happier and more workable state in the relationship is easier than expected.