This post outlines how family counselling can be beneficial to families undergoing difficult circumstances or experiences. It introduces what family counselling typically looks like and how it works to improve family dynamics.
What Is Family Counselling?
While family counselling looks different for every family, the general goal is to establish a sense of support, understanding, and communication among each family member. The best time to reach out and enroll in family counselling is when you or your family feel as though the problems you are facing are too big to handle alone, or aren’t improving with time. Ultimately, the goals of family therapy are generally to avoid family members placing blame on one another, to implement healthy problem-solving tactics, and to improve communication within the family.
The Benefits Of Family Counselling
There are many circumstances that can warrant the need for family counselling. Some common instances when family therapy is helpful include conflicts between family members, difficulties between siblings, a death in the family, or a divorce between parents. It’s also often used when an individual in the family is struggling from a serious mental health illness and this begins to impact the family’s relationships. Although family therapy is able to sort out difficulties at any given time, if you reach out early, family therapy may be able to reduce the severity of the problem before it builds up. Family counselling is a great place to set healthy boundaries, address and work out dysfunctional interactions, and implement good family dynamics. Counselling can also improve mental and physical health by helping families maintain a relaxed and peaceful mindset. Often, health complications occur when a person is in an unstable relationship and doesn’t feel safe or secure. Therapy can make relationships become stronger and healthier.
What Happens During Family Therapy
As previously mentioned, family therapy is tailored to meet each individual family’s needs, and therefore, no session will look the same for everyone. In general, the counsellor will begin by talking about the problem at hand with each family member. This will help to understand each person’s perspective on how they view the situation. The counsellor will then create a treatment plan for the family. Throughout the next few sessions, the counsellor will work to introduce healthy problem-solving tactics and communication techniques in order to help the family better communicate and work together. Due to unique problems and necessities, every therapy program is different, and the number of sessions that will be needed to resolve the issues and build healthy relationships varies with every family and their circumstances. It’s important to note that there are also many different types of family counselling that can be chosen based on a family’s needs. These include functional family therapy, multi systemic therapy, transgenerational therapy, and structural therapy. Each form of therapy addresses a different problem that families may be experiencing, whether it’s learning new strategies to deal with a child’s behaviour, or examining interactions across generations within a family.
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