Does your family feel stuck in unhealthy patterns of relating? Perhaps family members yell and argue to try to resolve problems? Or your family struggles with the effects of a parent’s substance abuse? Family therapy offers a great way to get unstuck.
Family therapy helps family members improve:
- communication and connection in the family
- conflict resolution, and/or
- specific issues such as a parent-child issue, grief, substance abuse, or the effect of a mental illness on the family.
Consequently, this type of family counseling helps you and your family members understand one another better and bring you closer together. Similar to what happens in couples counseling, in family therapy the therapist helps identify problems underlying the family’s functioning and guides the family to healthier functioning. Often this involves examining patterns in the family. This includes patterns inherited from previous generations that you may have little awareness of currently. This type of group counseling often focuses on learning effective conflict resolution skills, emotional regulation skills, and healthy communication skills.
This type of therapy recognizes that no one person is to blame for all a families woes. In other words, it looks at every family member’s role and response to problems. And it helps the family to shift to healthier functioning. While a session generally includes all members of the family, your therapist may at times see individual members or groups within the family separately as a part of therapy.