Family therapy
Sometimes families need support
Is your family struggling with a problem or issue that causes ongoing stress or conflict? Does you family feels stuck in repeating patterns or cycles of behaviour? Is it getting increasingly harder to talk or communicate with each other about what’s going on in your family? Do you feel like it’s getting harder to trust one another?
We don’t get to choose our families and often our family units struggle to collaborate or work out effective ways to support each other and make changes. This is a normal experience for many families. Family life doesn’t come with a manual and often how we deal with things is what we have learnt and had passed down to us from previous generations.
We might experience struggles that are family-wide or to do with just one family member, but where their problem affects the rest of the family.
Family therapy aims to reduce distress and conflict within families. It helps build positive interactions among members, grow quality of relationships, and supports healthy family development and functioning. Family therapy can support families at any stage of their journey, whether that’s for new parents, families with teenagers or caring responsibilities for ageing parents.
Family therapy views families as unique systems with their own structure and styles of relating and communicating. It also considers what is happening for families in their community and cultural systems. It addresses problems as patterns or structures that need adjusting, rather than being individual issues.
Unlike individual therapy, which focuses on the individual, family therapy looks at family functioning and relationships. This might be the immediate nuclear family, the extended family and, sometimes, include social networks.
The specific reasons for seeking family therapy differ for each family. Family therapy can deal with issues or crises or help with upcoming problems and transitions. It can be short- or long-term depending on the reasons for attending.
How can family therapy help?
At its core, family therapy helps family members resolve conflict and improve their communication and functionality. Family members can learn how to express their thoughts, feelings and needs more effectively, resulting in less hurt and damage to each other.
The goals of family therapy vary depending on your needs. After the first session, a treatment plan will be established to address specific needs and help family members develop skills, strategies and other resources to support with the resolution of the issue.
Sometimes family therapy may involve just the parents, helping them to learn new parenting skills or how to work more cohesively with each other.
Family therapy could also support children or teenagers working through specific challenges they are experiencing in school or in their family unit. If necessary, family therapy could sometimes engage with extended family such as grandparents or grandchildren if the issues extends beyond the immediate family unit.
Family therapy can support your family with the following:
- Dealing with difficult family life transitions such as separation, divorce, and death
- Resolving conflict or communication difficulties between family members between parents and/or children
- Supporting children and adolescents with behavioral and emotional problems
- Identifying and resolving relationship issues that may affect parents and/or children
- Managing issues arising from a blended family
- Dealing with life challenges for one person or the whole family
- Sibling conflict/rivalry or behavioural issues
- Developing parenting skills or dealing with parental problems
- Grief and Loss
- Stress and Anger
- The effects of trauma and major change
- Illness and disability in the family
- The effects of self-harm or drug and alcohol abuse
What should we expect from doing family therapy?
Frequently asked questions
What makes family therapy different?
Family therapy looks at families as being their own unique and complete systems. In a family system we consider that:
- When one person experiences problems, other family members are often affected by them
- The family has a pivotal role in foster social, emotional and mental wellbeing
- Working with the whole family supports individuals
- All family members can contribute to solutions to problems
What do we do in a session?
During a session, we will help yoiu identify the communication and behaviour patterns behind familial problems. We work with you to develop skills strategies and may explore your family roles, dynamics, and any underlying emotional issues or traumas that may be having an impact.
We might use techniques like role-plays, communication exercises, games and explorations of family history.
How do we prepare for our session?
What sort of family therapy do you practice?
Family therapy is an umbrella term for a number of different approaches.
In sessions, we use the following family therapy modalities:
- Systemic family therapy, which looks on how individuals are all interconnected in a family unit and how problems with one person have an impact on everybody.
- Structural family therapy, which looks at roles and hierachies within a family to see if there are any imbalances and how these can be rectified to create a more balanced family structure.
- Strategic family therapy, which uses brief behavioural interventions to see if there is any immediate change in a family’s functioning, without relying too heavily on the underlying causes.
- Narrative family therapy, which helps reframe the stories we tell in our family that may be self-defeating or perpetuating problems into new narratives that are empowering and healing.