What is Family Therapy?
Family Therapy focuses on creating a sense of strength, safety, and unity in a family by creating an environment where the members of the family assist each other in negotiating the challenges they are currently experiencing. The aim is to create a context where emotions and thoughts may be expressed in a safe environment in order for the family members to understand each other’s views and experiences.
“Family Therapy . . . helps people in a close relationship help each other. It enables family members, couples and others who care about each other to express and explore difficult thoughts and emotions safely, to understand each other’s experiences and views, appreciate each other’s needs, build on strengths and make useful changes in their relationships and their lives.” – Association for Family and Systemic Practice
“Deep inside us, we know what every family therapist knows: the problem between parents become the problems within the children.”
Rodger Gould
Family therapy may be useful in:
- dealing with conflict within the family
- adjusting to the addition of a new family member
- transitioning between the different life stages of a family
- assisting the family in understanding and adjusting to a member with psychological difficulties or any other medical condition
- grieving together after the loss of a family member
- negotiating family dynamics during the process of a divorce
- blending families together when parents re-marry