Family Therapy is an effective intervention for any type of therapeutic goal and has shown to be effective with goals ranging from increasing trust and open communication to helping a family to overcome mental health concerns or behavioral disruptions. I chose to specialize in family therapy and I have a long list of useful interventions to help your family. Listed below are some of the most common themes to look for during your family’s sessions.
I use various techniques to encourage the family to interact with each other while providing assistance to ensure that all members of the session feel safe and understood. I facilitate this while also encouraging members to continually work on isolating strengths and solutions so as not to have session after session of encounters that feel problem saturated and without guidance toward increasing hopefulness (hope that a solution can come to be is an important variable in successful therapeutic outcomes).
I have the family explore their family history to isolate themes which might shed some light on resolving the current challenge. There are certain behaviors (such as alcoholism, school disturbances, and fear of commitment) that seem to follow a pattern when looking at a family tree.
I provide a setting where I can help families to talk about the issues that most people have little experience talking about. Often families need assistance not only in solving an issue, but also in talking openly about an issue so as to be able to better support one another. Subjects such as the death of a loved one, divorce, becoming a teenager, sexual or gender orientation, impacted trust, or a family member’s anxiety or depression are a few examples of subjects that I can help your family to talk about while helping all the family members to feel protected from judgment and/or defensiveness.
I help the family to look at the ways that the family structure, family dynamics and family communication patterns are affecting the presenting problem. There is not a ‘one size fits all’ way for families to interact with one another; I can help to isolate the specific needs of all the individuals in a family so as to help the family to relate with one another in a way which best meets the needs of the individuals and the family system as a whole. When this is accomplished the need for a therapist generally is reduced. Family therapy has the goal of helping families to help themselves so that they are not overly dependant on something external to resolve their conflicts.