Therapy Group of Charlotte
Jan Stone Allen, MA, LMFT
Relationships, family patterns & the conversations that keep going wrong
About Jan
Most families who come to me aren’t broken — they’re stuck in a conversation that keeps going the same way. The same argument in different clothes, the same silence after it, the same feeling that everyone is trying and it isn’t landing. I help people find a different way through that, whether you come in on your own, as a couple, or with your teenager in the room.
I work with people from thirteen onwards, which means I’m often the person a family calls when something is going on with a young person and no one is quite sure how to talk about it. Adolescents tend to be more forthcoming than adults expect, provided the room feels like theirs rather than a place they’ve been sent to be corrected.
“People rarely need to be told what’s wrong in their relationships. They usually know. What they need is a way to say it that the other person can actually hear.”
Jan Stone Allen, MA, LMFT, Therapist Charlotte
My Approach
I’m trained in marriage and family therapy, which means I tend to look at problems as things that live between people rather than inside one of them. When a teenager is struggling, or a couple has stopped being curious about each other, or a parent feels like the villain in their own house, the useful question is usually not who’s at fault but what pattern everyone is caught in. Alongside that I use cognitive behavioural work for the practical side — what to actually do differently on a Tuesday evening — and a person-centred foundation underneath both, because none of it works if you don’t feel respected in the room.
In sessions I lean toward support rather than confrontation. I’m collaborative by instinct: I’d rather we work something out together than have me pronounce on it. That said, I’ll say the thing that needs saying, and in family work that sometimes means naming out loud what everyone has been carefully talking around.
Interested in working with Jan?
Take the first step — we’ll help you get started.
Before this, I was Director of Guidance at a preparatory school, which is where I learned how much of adolescence gets misread as defiance when it’s really distress. I also served as a Military and Family Life Counselor, working with families managing deployments, relocations, and the particular strain of a life organised around someone else’s orders. I’m an Approved Supervisor with the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, which means part of my work is training the next generation of family therapists.
If your household has been having the same difficult conversation for a while, or you have a teenager you’re worried about, or you and your partner want to stop having the same fight — that’s the work I’d like to do with you.
Educational Background
Common Questions
I want to understand what’s been happening and how it’s felt from where you’re sitting — and if there’s more than one of you in the room, I want that from each of you. I’m not there to decide who’s right. Mostly the first session is about creating a space where people can be honest without it turning into the argument you’ve already had a hundred times. By the end I’d like us to have some sense of the pattern we’re working on, in plain language.
Yes — I see clients from thirteen, and I’m one of the few therapists in the practice who does. I spent years as Director of Guidance at a preparatory school, and the thing I learned there is that a lot of what looks like defiance is distress that hasn’t found words yet. Teenagers usually talk, provided the room belongs to them and isn’t somewhere they’ve been sent to be fixed. I’ll be clear with both you and them about what stays between us and what doesn’t.
It’s the idea that a problem often belongs to the pattern rather than to a person. If one member of a family is struggling, that struggle is usually holding some role in how everyone relates — so treating that person alone can miss what’s actually maintaining it. In practice it means I’m interested in the sequence of what happens between you: who moves first, who withdraws, what everyone does next. Change the sequence and a surprising amount follows.
Both. I see people at our Charlotte office and by secure video across North Carolina. For family sessions in particular, being in a room together often helps — it’s easier to notice how people are with each other. But plenty of work goes well over video, and for busy households it’s sometimes the only way everyone actually turns up.
Ready — or still deciding?
Either way, we’ll make it easy. Get started with Jan directly, or tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll connect you with the right therapist. Takes a few minutes — no commitment.
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