Families can benefit in many ways from attending therapy together, when specific circumstances are putting a strain on family relationships and disrupting harmony within the family unit.
By providing a safe and open environment, family therapy can support families in addressing and overcoming a wide variety of issues, including divorce, death of a loved one, financial difficulties, and major transitions. This holistic approach has also proven highly effective in treating a range of mental health conditions that impact a family as a whole, such as depression, substance abuse or addiction, food issues and anxiety disorders.
With guidance and support from a trained therapist, family therapy benefits families by helping them to: identify and reduce sources of conflict and stress within the family, that are disrupting the family’s functioning and efficiency, reestablish and improve communication between family members, understand how personal actions affect the entire family – and vice versa, find ways for healthier expression of difficult emotions, better understand each other’s experiences and perspectives, work on acceptance and forgiveness, understand and respect the points of view and opinions of other family members, appreciate and value each other’s needs, develop a deeper sense of empathy, honesty and trust towards one another, develop and maintain healthy, clear boundaries – preventing codependency, identify and improve family patterns and dynamics, learn and promote problem-solving skills and coping skills, learn healthy conflict resolution skills, build on family strengths to develop a more supportive family environment and to strengthen bonds, bring back and support family members who may have been isolated.
Family therapy helps family members, caregivers and friends to better understand and support each other. It helps to significantly reduce family conflict and provides a valuable range of skills and tools that families can use during therapy and well into the future.