Considering family therapy? Here’s what you need to know

A Quick Guide

Family therapy, also known as counseling, aims to strengthen family bonds by addressing social, emotional, and behavioral problems within the family unit. Various types of family therapy, such as narrative therapy, supportive therapy, psychoeducation, functional therapy, and family systems therapy, employ techniques like structural, psychodynamic, and behavioral techniques to promote healthy functioning and resolve conflicts. It can help with a range of issues, including parenting problems, communication difficulties, behavioral issues in children, trauma, and mental health problems affecting the entire family.

What is Family Therapy?

Family therapy or counseling is used to help strengthen the bonds in a family. This approach helps you deal with your family issues by taking a look at the unique social, emotional, or behavioral problems a family may face. So it can help you to create a healthy family environment and resolve conflicts between family members.

Types

There are a few different types which are as follows:

• Narrative Family therapy: This approach emphasizes every individual in the family. Since it requires people to tell their story from their side. Through this approach, people can also learn to accept others and think beyond their perceptions.
• Supportive family therapy: This approach focuses on creating a safe space where every member of the family can freely express what they are feeling.
• Psychoeducation: This approach focuses on educating the family members about different mental health conditions. This way they can act as a cohesive support system for each other.
• Functional family therapy: This is a short-term therapy. It usually addresses problems with risky behaviors such as drug addiction etc. It also focuses on helping teenagers and their families look for solutions, by having mutual respect and trust. 
• Family systems therapy: This approach focuses on helping people overcome their problems by making them utilize the strength of their relationships.

Techniques

The techniques used in this approach depend on the types of issues a family faces. Some of which are as follows:

• Structural Techniques: This technique focuses on creating a healthy power balance in the family while also maintaining appropriate boundaries. So this way your family can have improved functioning. 
• Psychodynamic Techniques: This technique focuses on understanding and exploring where each family member is coming from. And what shapes them to be who they are. The therapist can also help you and your family develop new emotional insights and figure out various ways for effective responses to dealing with problems.
• Behavioral Techniques: This technique mostly focuses on teaching skills and psychoeducation for the family members. You can learn to work on specific problems such as communication problems by using role-play or modeling techniques.

Some other specific techniques that can help are as follows:

• Reflective listening
• Emotional Validation
• Empathy
• Cognitive reframing

How can family therapy help?

It can help you with different issues, some of which are the following:

• Parenting problems
• Death of a loved one
• Communication issues
• The behavioral issues in children or teenagers
• Problems in school
• Caring for a family member with special needs
• Some major or stressful life transitions
• Parent-child conflicts
• Issues between siblings
• Issues with extended family members
• Trauma
• Divorce, separation, or marital problems

This approach can also help with individual mental health problems which may be affecting the entire family. For instance, if a family member has a chronic illness, depression, anxiety, or substance use.

Because it focuses on effective communication. The family members learn to be more expressive with their thoughts and feelings and resolve conflict in healthy ways. It also focuses on how a single member’s issues are addressed in the family. 

For instance, one family member has some mental health issue so through this therapy, they can alter some conditions which are triggering the issue. Moreover, other family members may also receive psychoeducation if they lack awareness about that issue. Because at times, they can engage in some behavior that can either lead to that issue or worsen it. So this approach can help them in supporting each other.  

We hope you found this article helpful in understanding family therapy, its types, its techniques, and its benefits.