Working through your personal struggles and challenges may be very difficult and require much courage and strength, however, the growth, change, and meaning achieved are worthy of your efforts. Therapy provides a safe environment for you to share your thoughts and feelings without the risk of being judged. Individual therapy helps you find a deeper sense of meaning, purpose, zest, and creativity in life.

Therapy enables us to become intellectually and emotionally aware of the underlying sources of our difficulties in part by re-experiencing those difficulties in a healing environment. By reprocessing experiences we can learn better coping strategies that will enable us to free our emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and spiritual energy and ultimately find new ways of being.

Throughout life, patterns in our relationships tend to be stable and enduring. Childhood attachment patterns are recapitulated throughout life and become a model for one’s romantic relationships. Romantic relationships generally duplicate the emotional experiences of one’s childhood and family. Couples therapy provides an opportunity to explore these deep rooted patterns and bring passion back into the relationship by rebuilding and restoring the emotional connection.

Couples therapy helps partners develop and maintain an in sync connection. This is a kind of interweaving of emotional experiences that involves efforts to emotionally be where the other is, a mutual coordination to be in tune. Effective relationships have an artful way in which they manage negative emotions. They introduce humor to soothe and calm the interaction. These positive emotions play a role in undoing the physiological arousal caused by negative emotions. This back and forth process supports using creative agreements to resolve conflicts. The therapy process supports both partners in the relationship to stay motivated to maintain the connection and communicate in the face of discord and difficulty.

Couples therapy is also helpful for divorcing parents. Many times divorcing parents need to learn to communicate with each other in an adult fashion, address their concerns and issues with respect, learn how each other’s interpersonal style affects their ability to communicate and co-parent, and know how and when to disengage from each other. Both parents need to recognize that their ongoing power struggle with each other severely and negatively impacts their children. When the complex issues of their power struggle have been limited to the co-parenting of the children, it becomes easier for parents to find a middle path of compromise and keep their children from being caught in the middle of their disputes.

At times family members may find themselves struggling and they may not know how to identify and correct the difficulties. Family therapy can assist families in identifying the problem areas and creating solutions to resolve the issues. By utilizing an integrated treatment approach the specific needs of the children and/or family are addressed in a collaborative matter between the psychologist and the family.

Therapy supports children and adolescents in many ways. Therapy provides children a neutral and safe place to share their feelings, concerns, problems, and fears. Through therapy children learn to understand their feelings, find new solutions to their problems and concerns, and develop tools to help them manage their difficulties.

Divorce can have devastating effects on children that are often reflected in the child’s emotional and behavioral functioning, self esteem, school performance, familial relationships, peer relationships, and future personal relationships. Children who are exposed to continuous high conflict between their parents often fare much worse and may have difficulties in their relationships once they are adults. Research supports the level of conflict between the parents is the major contributing factor to a child’s emotional adjustment after divorce.

High conflict and power struggles between parties create a tumultuous emotional climate that negatively impacts their ability to work together. To reduce the level of conflict between the parties, the negative interpersonal dynamics of the relationship need to be transcended. The parties will learn about the patterns of their conflict and its effect on their relationship. Mindfulness strategies will be developed to improve communication, cooperation, and commitment to core values.

Parents who are willing and able to communicate and co-parent in a positive fashion can help their children immensely. Through Parent Coordination, parents can learn how to use conflict in a healing and healthy way, learn how to become more intentional rather than reactive, and can discover ways to step out of power struggle with the opposite parent rather than be controlled by it. Learning to get along for the best interest of the child is indeed possible and serves as an important role model for the children. Although the process may be very taxing, it will provide parents with an awareness of options for behaving, relating, and understanding differently.

The parent coordination process focuses on improving the effectiveness of communication skills between parents and developing strong co-parenting relationships. The process helps clients create the most effective parenting plan that will best serve the developmental and psychological needs of their children. Parent coordination services are tailored to meet the needs of the specific family and are available through individual and joint sessions. Participation in Parent Coordination services can be voluntary or court ordered.

The collaborative law process allows divorcing parties to develop solutions that best meet their needs while controlling the outcome. The process gives both parties a chance to be heard as well as listen to the perspective of the other party. It is a value driven process that enables the parties to work out their differences in productive ways that minimize disruption and escalation of conflict. The process is based on fairness, trust, respect, non-judgment, and what is in the best interest of the parties.

The overall goal is to assist the clients in reaching a positive resolution to their dissolution of marriage through the collaborative law divorce process. This resolution will minimize the negative economic, social, and emotional consequences a family often experiences in the traditional adversarial divorce process. Dr. Prange’s role in the collaborative law process is to facilitate communication between the spouses, financial advisor, and both attorneys. Dr. Prange may provide education, guidance, and coaching; facilitate discussion about the parties’ needs and priorities; encourage compliance, and develop methods to improve the communication between the parties. The services are tailored to assist the parties reduce the power struggle between them so they may make decisions in a fashion consistent with their needs.

Mediation is an empowering process in that it allows divorcing parties to determine the outcome of their divorce based on creative compromises. Dr. Prange’s role in mediation is an impartial and neutral third party who helps to identify issues, reduce obstacles to communication, explore settlement options, and foster joint problem solving. Mediation gives divorcing parties the opportunity to make decisions for their family versus the Courts making the same decisions that will impact all family members for many years to come. The mediation process is confidential and not open to discovery by the Courts.

Parenting Plan evaluations are conducted independently through Court appointment. These comprehensive evaluations involve all members of the family unit, including the children. A multi-trait multi-method approach for data collection is utilized in order to make recommendations to the Courts regarding what is in the best interest of the children for parenting responsibility time and other services that may be needed.

Parenting Plan evaluations are based on the premise that specific issues need to be examined from multiple information sources using various methodologies, consistent with the multi-trait multi-method approach. Analyzing issues from several different perspectives results in an increase in the reliability of the information obtained and the validity of conclusions generated.

This convergent model of data collection has gained professional support and agreement over the past five years and has been identified by forensic psychologists¹ as the model that best serves the evidentiary needs of the Court. The American Psychological Association² and the Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists³ have included this model in the recommended ethical standards and professional practice guidelines for conducting forensic evaluations.

The traditional therapeutic confidentiality and privileged communication rules do not apply in parenting plan litigation. When entering one’s mental state and parenting abilities into the Court proceedings as evidence anything told to the evaluator in the context of the evaluation is not confidential and is open to discovery. Any and all information shared can potentially be included in the report or released during sworn testimony by deposition or court appearance. All other appropriate ethical and legal requirements of confidentiality and privileged communication remain intact.



Evaluative Mediation is a combination of family law mediation and a parenting plan evaluation not just facilitated mediation. This hybrid service is settlement focused and designed for families who need assistance resolving parenting plan disputes but want the help to occur outside of the court room as well as want to remain in control of the outcomes.

Forensic-based procedures commonly seen in parenting plan evaluations are utilized to conduct an “evaluative mediation”. In evaluative mediation, Dr. Prange will be acting in the role of a Parenting Plan Consultant who proposes options to resolve the case. These options are derived from the data collected and represent solutions that address the common underlying interests of the family, particularly the children’s need for cooperative involvement with both parents.

The Evaluative Mediation process is confidential and utilized for settlement purposes only. All members of the family, including the children, are interviewed. The voice of the children is extremely important in Evaluative Mediation. A written report of the process is not completed rather a Parenting Plan is crafted that identifies the agreements and decisions made by the parents.