Passion Led Us Here

Brooke Farrell, Ph.D., LCMHC and Tamara Ancona, LPC, CPCS have dedicated their careers to helping youth and families heal. In their efforts to address the increased complexities of their clients’ families, Brooke and Tamara created the original Family Connect Assessment tool in 2015. They wanted to find a way to get richer clinical information about family members, so that treatment could be dialed-in and focused on individual and family system clinical needs. The original Family Connect Assessment produced robust data and made a significant contribution to treatment for individual family members and the whole system, though it involved time-intensive processes with paper questionnaires and live clinical interviews.

After multiple years of conducting the original Family Connect Assessment, feedback from families and Mental Health Providers highlighted the need to make this unique tool more accessible to a broader audience in a user-friendly format.

The Family Connect Assessment (FCA) online is the result of this endeavor.

The Family Connect Assessment (FCA) online is a comprehensive assessment tool that focuses on attachment, communication, boundaries, and conflict resolution patterns in families.  The findings detail therapeutic interventions to address areas of dysfunction within each family system.  It is an efficient, clinical tool that provides parents and Mental Health Providers with a directive path towards healthier family relationships. 

  • Tamara Ancona, LPC CPCS

    FOUNDER

    Tamara Ancona has a Master of Arts in Psychology and is a Licensed Professional Counselor (GA). Her professional background includes counseling individuals and families in acute residential care, corporate settings and in private practice prior to launching her educational consulting practice in 1999. As founder of TAG Counseling, she utilizes a comprehensive approach to assessing the unique needs of each of her clients and particularly in the midst of their most disruptive spiral. She brings skill and expertise to helping families find the most suitable therapeutic intervention and educational setting to help shift the developmental trajectory of their struggling teen or young adult child. She also has vast experience facilitating therapeutic, educational and experiential groups with both the adult and teen populations. Industry professionals continue to recognize her contribution for pioneering and facilitating exceptional client and family care.

  • Brooke Farrell, Ph.D., LCMHC

    FOUNDER

    Brooke Farrell, Ph.D., LCMHC is the co-founder of Family Connect Assessment (FCA) and founder of Unify, a private practice dedicated to supporting individuals, parents, and families in deeper healing and transformational growth through relationship work (with self and each other). Brooke also created Unify Families, a transition support program for teens and young adults transitioning from a treatment setting, and she ran for 12 years. Having worked with parents, children and families for over 20 years, Brooke’s experience also includes clinical positions in psychiatric, wilderness, and residential settings as well as in academia as a university professor. Her education in Mental Health Counseling (M.S.) and a Ph.D. in Child & Family Studies, both from the University of Tennessee, have created a foundation from which her clinical expertise has continued to grow. Brooke has additional training in attachment theory, family systems, research and assessment, polyvagal theory, IFS (Internal Family Systems), and trauma, which informed the development of the Family Connect Assessment tool.

  • Sara Eden, LCSW

    ASSOCIATE

    As a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), Sara has acted as a therapist at a child and adolescent counseling center, a grief counselor for children and teens, and most recently, as Director of Upper School counseling at Pace Academy, an independent private school in Atlanta. During her 13-year tenure in this role, she created a counseling department across all divisions and gained experience supporting adolescents through mental health challenges including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, and gender and sexuality.

    Currently, Sara is an associate with TAG Counseling, focusing on educational and therapeutic consulting. She helps families navigate the mental health system when their children need support beyond what local resources can offer and acts as a liaison between programs and their clients. Sara looks forward to integrating her skill set and working with and supporting families throughout their journeys. " After working with many families throughout my career, I noticed there was a gap between a child's therapeutic work and family therapy. The FCA is the missing link to understanding how to build a stronger family system."