Family therapy is a type of psychotherapy that aims to help family members stay in touch with each other and learn how to improve themselves for a better relationship by identifying the effects of their differences on their relationships. Family therapy is administered by a family therapist who specializes in working with families. Family therapy adopts a solution-oriented approach.
In family therapy, each member of the family who contributes to the issue is actively engaged in the process.
The following guidelines will help you decide whether it's time to schedule an appointment with a family therapist.
- Ongoing family conflicts
- Opinions regarding severing familial ties
- Developmental life crisis (for example, the problem of expulsion from school faced by the adolescent in the family)
- Role conflicts within the family (for example, mixing of housewife and mother roles)
- Stressful life situations that generate tension
- The disintegration of boundaries between parents and children
- Family difficulties, including intergenerational relationships
- Communication difficulties
- Having more negative feelings and trouble talking about them (anger, etc.)
- A family member has a psychological problem (for example, depression, substance abuse)
- Your experiences that are not listed here but that you think directly or indirectly affect your family relationship.
Therapy for families examines how each family member can and should contribute to solving the challenges faced by the unit as a whole. Participating in family therapy:
- Helps family members get closer and learn how to get through hard times in a supportive environment.
- Helps family members solve problems and talk about how they feel in a healthy way.
- Helps family members figure out their roles in the family, the rules, and how they act. Also helps them find problems that cause conflict and ways to solve them.
- Helps family members see and change unhealthy patterns in their relationships.
- Helps family members find out how their expectations of each other are different.
- Helps family members figure out what problems are making them fight and how to solve them.
- Helps family members to think of things that the whole family can do together and to find ways to make these things fun.
- Helps family members communicate about their extended family problems and understand and resolve these issues with their causes
- Helps family members learn about potential sources of change in their relationships and identify relational flaws that restrict the influence of these resources
- Helps family members identify their strengths, such as decision-making together, as well as their limitations, such as mistrust of one another
"Children feel lost when the parents' emotions are ineffective or too vague, or when the mother's emotions are temporarily compromised elsewhere." - Anna Freud