Find a family therapist who meets your needs.
Family Therapy
While there are individual people within a family, there may be issues that affect the whole family. Families often seek treatment to solve problems as a family.
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”
— Albert Ellis
What is Family Therapy?
Family therapy is a type of therapy designed to address specific issues that affect the psychological health of the family. Common examples of family issues are major life transitions or mental health conditions. Family therapy may be used as the primary mode of treatment or as a complementary approach.
Isn’t Therapy Difficult?
Families often go through problematic situations that cause stress and can rupture the emotional bonds between family members. The goal of therapy is to have everyone be able to express themselves and work together to achieve a solution in which everyone feels they have a stake.
What’s the Purpose?
Family-focused sessions can help you address issues that affect everyone in the house, and work towards increased communication and greater understanding. In learning how to speak up, and learning how to listen, concerns that once pulled the family apart can be repurposed into areas for connection.
How Therapy Can Help
Families can benefit from therapy when they experience any stressful event that may strain family relationships. They can also benefit from therapy by improving communication, resolving conflicts, and creating fertile ground to help alleviate mental distress.
Why Family Therapy?
There are many reasons why family therapy might be right for you.
Here are a few of the best ones.
Solving Problems, Together
We cannot foresee all the events that might occur in our lives. Death, divorce, financial troubles—these are some of the issues you might encounter as families, and yet you might not be completely prepared to deal with these situations. Therapy can help you navigate the situation as a family, and come up with solutions to relieve the stress that comes along with these traumatic situations.
Emphasize Strengths
Families often possess talents and strengths of which they may not be aware. Your family might be quite good at working together, or you might be great at supporting each other emotionally in times of need. Therapy can help highlight these strengths and channel them in daily life to help your family live together more effectively.
Family Mental Health Concerns
Mental health issues can be crucial for families. Mental illness affecting one member can end up affecting the entire family, how they interact with one another, and their overall happiness. By working through one family member’s difficulty together, families can voice their opinions without judgment and find ways to compromise on potential solutions to their problems and concerns.
Resolving Conflict
Conflicts will arise in every family. However, therapy can help your family better handle these conflicts when they do inevitably happen. In therapy, you’ll examine your family's ability to solve problems and express thoughts and emotions in a productive manner, with the goal of reaching compromise, no matter the difficulty you face.
Improve Family Communication
Communication is key for any relationship, whether it’s romantic or familial. Therapy can help families learn new ways to communicate effectively with one another, be able to express themselves and get a point across without feeling attacked and without offending another member of the family. These skills, learned in therapy, can help family members in situations outside the family circle.
Explore Rules
As parents, you set rules and expectations in your household to create an environment of respect. While the rules you set up may have good intentions, their effect might actually be negative. On the other hand, you might not have substantive rules in place, and your family could benefit from a more structured approach.
Common Symptoms of Family Distress
If any of the following symptoms prevent you from enjoying your daily life, you might benefit from therapy to address these issues.
Divorce
The parental relationship is incredibly important for the health of the family. Any rupture, whether it’s divorce, separation, or even constant conflict between parents, will have repercussions on each member of the family. Even if a couple chooses to divorce, there are ways to do so that could minimize psychological anguish.
Lack of Communication
If family members are not communicating, that’s a sign that something isn’t right. Family members need to talk to each other about many aspects of daily life: taking out the trash, doing chores, buying groceries, giving each other space, and supporting each other emotionally. If family members aren’t communicating, they will have trouble knowing when other family members need support, for example.
Death
A death in the family is always a potential for family conflict. Everyone deals with death in different ways, and yet families seldom communicate with each other on how they are coping with the loss of a family member. This can cause symptoms of PTSD, but can also cause resentment between family members.
Behavioral Issues
If a child is having social and academic problems, it’s important to take a look at the family patterns that may contribute to the child’s acting out, rather than evaluating the child's behavior alone. As the source of the problem is discovered, parents can learn to support their child and work to minimize or alter the conditions that contribute to their child's unwanted behavior.
Substance Abuse
When one family member experiences addiction, it can affect the whole family. Those who struggle with substance abuse have had their priorities hijacked by the substance, causing hurt in the family. Other members might feel resentment toward the person with addictive patterns, which might make it more difficult for them to recover.
Parenting Differences
It’s not easy being a parent, especially when you feel like you can’t work together with your spouse or with your children. Parenting is a mixture of love and education, and finding the right balance between the two can be difficult. Without the proper balance, the bond between parents and children (or even between parents themselves) can begin to sever and damage the family unit.
Addiction in the Family
Addiction is a complicated dysfunction in the brain, wherein a person needs to use a substance or engage in a behavior in order to feel at peace. This can be physiological or psychological, depending on the individual. More often than not, addiction ends up affecting those around the individual, especially those in the immediate family circle.
Children living under the cloud of addiction are more likely to experience developmental delays and experience neglect. Children and teens of those who use substances suffer a higher rate of psychological and behavioral problems, too. Children might assume the role of caregiver, denying their own emotional need for a parental figure.
Substance abuse can lead to many relationship issues for couples, ranging from trust issues to codependency and enabling. Those in the immediate circle may develop symptoms of mental illnesses like PTSD or anxiety. Substance use can also increase the likelihood of violence in the home, so seeking help might be an urgent matter.
Mental Health & Addiction
Many people who develop substance use disorders or addictive patterns are also diagnosed with mental disorders, and it works the other way around, too. Individuals who have an addiction tend to act in ways that ignore their own needs, and this can lead to myriad physical and psychological issues.
Treatment & Recovery
Recovery begins when the addicted person joins an addiction treatment program that offers counseling services. Family therapy is helpful at this point to create opportunities for family members to rebuild trust and learn to support an addicted loved one without engaging in enabling behaviors.
How Family Therapy Can Help
Addiction is a treatable disease. With time and effort, your family and anyone affected by the addiction can repair the damage and move towards recovery together. In therapy, you’ll explore the complexity of addiction, its effect on relationships, and how you and your loved ones can heal.
