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What is Family Therapy

Family therapy is a type of psychological counseling that can help family members improve communication and resolve conflicts that is often short term. It may include all family members or just those able or willing to participate. Family therapy sessions can teach you skills to deepen family connections and get through stressful times, even after you’re done going to therapy sessions.

Understanding Family Therapy

Some key issues but not limited to:

  • When a child is having a problem such as with school, substance abuse, or disordered eating
  • A major trauma or change that impacts the entire family (i.e. relocation to a new house, natural disaster, incarceration of a family member)
  • Unexpected or traumatic loss of a family member
  • Adjustment to a new family member in the home (i.e. birth of a sibling, adoption, foster children, a grandparent entering the home)
  • Domestic violence
  • Divorce
  • Parent Conflict

During family therapy, you can:

  • Examine your family’s ability to solve problems and express thoughts and emotions in a productive manner
  • Explore family roles, rules and behavior patterns to identify issues that contribute to conflict — and ways to work through these issues
  • Identify your family’s strengths, such as caring for one another, and weaknesses, such as difficulty confiding in one another

Family therapy can be helpful on many levels. A good course of family therapy helps:

  • Develops and maintains healthy boundaries
  • Fosters cohesion and communication among family members
  • Promotes problem solving through understanding of family patterns and dynamics
  • Builds empathy and understanding
  • Reduces family conflict

Sessions typically take about 50 minutes to an hour.

Family therapy is often short term — generally about 12 sessions. However, how often you meet and the number of sessions you’ll need will depend on your family’s particular situation and the therapist’s recommendation.

Problems in your family can affect all areas of family members’ lives. You and your loved ones might notice trouble cropping up at work, at school, or in everyday interactions with other people.

When it feels like the issues in your family are too big for you to handle — and aren’t getting better — it may be time to see a family therapist.

Why Should I choose Family Therapy

In family therapy we seek to understand the context that produces the child’s problematic behaviors. Why does the child misbehave? Is it simply because they are naughty or a lost cause? Or might there be larger issues that trigger the child’s behaviors?

Family therapy attempts to understand the context of the behaviors in order to figure out how to change the whole system.

The family therapy approach conceptualizes a child within the entire family system by gathering a complete family history. Through this lens, we attempt to understand how the child’s behaviors might make sense to the child in the context of their family system. 

Call us at 469-714-0006 or email us at info@exulthealthcare.com