The Beginners Guide to Family Therapy (& Whether It’s a Fit for Yours)
Family therapy is a type of psychotherapy that focuses on addressing challenges within a family system, helping to identify problematic behaviors and improve relationships amongst members. Family therapy provides applicable and effective tools to enhance communication, conflict management, and awareness of one another.
What is a Family?
The word family is highly adaptable and subjective. Due to our lived experiences, how we understand the word family can be drastically different. The word family has changed and adapted in meaning greatly since its introduction into the English language.
Traditionally defined, a family is a group of people that live together under one roof, consisting of a mother and a father and their children.
Modern views of the word family understand it to be multi-dimensional, consisting of several different groups of people who may or may not share ancestry and genetics.
Family therapy adopts a holistic, modern and progressive approach to understanding families in both traditional and non-traditional dynamics.
Just as with any group of people, conflict and stress can cause significant strain on a family system. Family theorists believe that the functioning of a family system has a greater impact on individual well-being than that of individual concerns. Not only that, but our family dynamics can also greatly impact the way that we interact with individuals outside of our family system.
Stress in families can be difficult to manage and can feel that you are constantly spinning your wheels in attempts to find solutions. When the conflict becomes difficult to manage alone, it might be helpful to reach out for therapeutic support from a mental health professional.
What is Family Therapy?
Family therapy is a branch of psychotherapy that focuses primarily on the interactions, structure, and patterns within relationships that influence both individual and familial functioning.
The aim of family therapy is to develop awareness, understanding, and increased empathy among members of a family with the hope of facilitating lasting change.
The family is viewed as a system, or a microsystem, meaning that the concerns presented within therapy will be looked at through a relational lens rather than an individual lens.
Through understanding the system, the therapist will assess and identify key areas of concern that are currently contributing to stress within your family and provide you with applicable and useful tools to address these issues.
Benefits of Family Therapy
It can feel as though the walls are closing around you and your family. As stress begins to impact the family system, conflict may begin to increase, communication may begin to suffer, which can lead to changed dynamics between family members. Once stress enters your family, it can feel increasingly more difficult to share your feelings and emotions amongst your family.
To be open with one another requires a great deal of vulnerability, patience, and understanding. Family therapy can therefore bridge the gap for family members by providing a safe, empathetic, and supported space.
At times, you may feel that the only safe space to talk to each other is in the presence of your therapist. Therapy provides an opportunity to discuss concerns and conflicts amongst a mental health professional that can guide your family in reaching a solution to your problems.
Therapy can help to increase your understanding of your individual impact on the family and help to identify personal goals. Further, family therapy aids in developing greater empathy and understanding of each other resulting in families becoming stronger and more satisfied as a family unit.
The benefits of therapy will differ from family to family, however some of the main outcomes that you can expect from family therapy are:
Communication Skills Development (enhancement, improvement, reducing negative sentiment)
Increase in problem solving abilities and examine current ability to solve problems
Expressing feelings in a thoughtful and productive way
Conflict and anger management
Identifying family strengths and weaknesses
Increased empathy for one another
Improved relationships among members
We must remember that family therapy is not a magic solution to making all of your problems go away. However, it is an extremely effective tool in helping family members to understand one another better, and can provide skills to effectively cope and work through challenging situations.
Research supports that families often leave therapy feeling a sense of togetherness, and with a greater understanding of one another.
Common Reasons Families Attend Therapy
Just as with individual therapy, when a family reaches out for therapeutic support, it is often in regard to a particular presenting concern.
Oftentimes, this may center around one individual that has been identified as problematic and is causing stress on the family. As we know, family therapy focuses on the system rather than the individual, and therefore looks at the presenting concern as a symptom of the greater problem.
Think of it like going to the doctor- you might go to the doctor with one or two concerns and your doctor will do a full assessment of you before understanding and giving you a diagnosis. The same happens in family therapy.
Once there is an understanding of the origin or impact of the identified symptom on family functioning, the therapist will then support the family in identifying and solving particular problems in the interest of increasing harmony among family members (Kirpekar, Loganathan, & Varghese, 2020).
It’s no secret that times are extremely tough in our world right now. There are many reasons that a family may feel that they need additional support and are unable to navigate the ever-changing society that we currently live in.
Below are some of the most common reasons that a family may choose to attend therapy:
Marital problems (see also: couples counselling)
Parent-child conflict
Sibling conflict
Illness
External stressors (pandemics, world events, natural disasters)
Parenting skills
Psychoeducation
Emotional awareness and understanding
School issues
Behavioral Issues
What to Expect in Family Therapy Sessions
Family therapy can feel intimidating at times, especially if there is a great deal of conflict that is currently occurring within your family. Choosing to attend therapy as a family can be a huge decision, and takes a great deal of vulnerability and openness to allow someone into your family such as a therapist.
A common question that I am often asked is what to expect in sessions. This is a great question and provides the opportunity for your therapist to give some background to their approach and to calm any nerves or fears you might be having.
During the first few sessions you can expect your therapist to ask you a lot of questions! The therapist will be looking to understand background, history and identifying information that can provide detail to the current level of functioning within the family system.
The therapist will observe the dynamics among family members, along with body language and tone to gather an understanding of where the stress and strain may be present.
After initially assessing the family dynamics, the therapist will formulate some key strategies and effective tools in order to address the concerns specific to your family. You can expect the therapist to involve themselves through observation of your family, questioning, inferencing, providing input and meaning to the potential functions and/or reasons behind certain behaviors.
The therapist will actively work to adapt the individual view to be relational; ensuring that the lens remains relational, as opposed to individual.
Family Therapy is traditionally somewhat brief in nature, consisting of typically 10-12 sessions before your family may begin to experience noticeable change. You may be provided with activities and homework to do as a family between sessions to ensure that you are actively participating and applying the skills that have been addressed within the session.
See also: How to Get the Most Out of Couples Therapy.
Understanding the Family Structure is Key
Understanding the family structure and relationships between members is key in gaining a full picture perspective of levels of functioning.
Salvador Minuchin, the founder of Structural Family Therapy, believed that understanding the family structure was key to successful family therapy. Minuchin believed that the therapist, through therapeutic technique, must join with the family to understand invisible rules and standards that govern current family functioning, along with identifying potentially dysfunctional relationships among members contributing to a larger family concern.
In the first one or two sessions your therapist may draw out a genogram, which is essentially structurally similar to a family tree, however serves a more complex purpose. Genograms include information about relationships and interactions between family members.
As families are generational, oftentimes stress and conflict can also go back several generations. Your therapist will use the genogram as a tool to understand patterns, generational impact of functioning, and the impact of specific relationships on the family system.
Although incredibly useful, genograms can be somewhat problematic as the way that family members see one another can be very different. This information can help therapists to understand the impact these differences have on current levels of functioning and can aid in increasing communication among family members.
How to Get the Most out of Family Therapy
To get the most out of your sessions, your therapist might ask you and a family to identify several goals, or an outcome that you would like to achieve during your time in therapy.
It can be incredibly helpful to think about these goals prior to the initial session so that you have some time as individuals, or as a family to identify specific areas you would like to address during your time in therapy.
If you are attending therapy with children, you may find it helpful to preface family therapy to your children and explain what they can expect during the sessions (see also: Adolescents Therapy). Express to them that they are safe to share any feelings or emotions that they might have and that it’s helpful for the therapist to understand what they are going through.
As with any therapy, it’s important to remember that therapy is most effective when all members are active and willing participants.
It can also be extremely helpful if members attend therapy with and open mind. However, it’s understandable that this is not always the case. Certain members may not see the benefit in attending therapy and may be resistant to the idea.
If you are concerned about participation amongst members of the family, you may want to bring that to the therapist's attention during the consultation so that the therapist can support in engaging these members in the process.
Focus on your strengths.
I know what you’re thinking- don’t you come to therapy to work on your weaknesses not strengths? Although our weaknesses can be a driver for seeking therapy, it can be incredibly valuable to highlight and focus on strengths to re-establish connection and increase positive regard among family members.
Relationships and families take work- however, the lasting impact and positive change that can come from it can be everlasting and so very worth it!
Family Therapy at FP Counselling
If you are finding that your family is having trouble communicating and working through concerns, you may benefit to speak with one of our therapists at FP Counselling.
We offer complementary 20-minute consultations for you to get a chance to get to know our approach and to see if we might be a good fit for you, and to answer any questions you might have.
We highly encourage you to pick a time that your whole family is home- that way we can get a chance to speak with everyone. We would be more than happy to speak with you and look forward to hearing from you!
References & Further Reading
Alexander, J.A., Waldron, H.B., & Robbins, M.S., & Neeb, A. (2013). Functional Family Therapy for Adolescent Behavior Problems. American Psychological Association.
Minuchin, S., Lee, W., & Simon, G. M. (1996). Mastering family therapy: Journeys of growth and transformation (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Sexton, T. L., & Lebow, J. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of family therapy. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group
Tuerk, E. H., McCart, M. R., & Henggeler, S. W. (2012). Collaboration in family therapy. Journal of clinical psychology, 68(2), 168–178. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.21833
Varghese, M., Kirpekar, V., & Loganathan, S. (2020). Family Interventions: Basic Principles and Techniques. Indian journal of psychiatry, 62(Suppl 2), S192–S200. https://doi.org/10.4103/psychiatry.IndianJPsychiatry_770_19
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