Keeping your family united and free from conflict can be difficult even during the best of times, but when something disrupts its equilibrium—such as divorce, remarriage, illness, or substance abuse—fractures may begin to form. As communication falters, dissent and disconnection can take hold.

When problems arise, you may find it difficult to navigate new roles and establish healthy boundaries. And if healthy communication between family members has broken down, it can cause frustration, stress, and emotional exhaustion.

One Member’s Challenges Can Affect The Entire Family

Because a family is like a multi-cell organism, one member’s challenges affect everyone. The issues they are dealing with may have given rise to factions forming within the family. As everyone tries to grapple with crisis—whether related to health, finances, or some other disruption—there may be differences in opinion about how to address the issue, leading to family arguments or breakdowns in communication. 

Perhaps the children in your blended family are having problems adjusting to the new arrangement. Or maybe you are raising another family member’s child while they are dealing with a personal crisis and you’re struggling to help them address their trauma and grief.

More than anything, you want peace within your family and an end to all of the arguing, fear, sadness, and hopelessness that have taken over a cohesive dynamic. Fortunately, therapy can help your family restore peace and provide you with a game plan for moving forward together. By developing healthy boundaries and offering better ways of communicating, a therapist can guide your family toward union and common ground.

Families May Need Guidance At Every Phase Of Life

If one thing in life is constant, it’s change. Our families grow and evolve as members are added by birth, adoption, or marriage or taken away by death or divorce. These natural transitions can take a lot for us to process. Sometimes we can use guidance from outside of our family to help us reexamine the roles, boundaries, and expectations we hold for each other.

In addition to the normal ebbs and flows we expect, a family can be forever changed by a crisis that threatens to irreparably damage its delicate equilibrium. Traumatic circumstances like suicide, incarceration, or mental illness can often pull a family apart. When faced with a crisis, we need to do what we can to keep our family together so we can come out stronger on the other side.

Adjusting To Changes Can Impact Family Dynamics

Our families are constantly bombarded with change which can be both voluntary and involuntary. We can have more difficulty adapting to these changes when we consider our family’s unique cultural heritage, beliefs, and values. Multicultural and multigenerational clashes within our family can often lead to conflict, misunderstanding, or toxic relationships.

And although we have to remain flexible to adapt to changes within our family, if we become too lax, we may lack the foundation needed to support each other through times of transition. For our family to evolve, we have to be open to new ideas while still holding onto the traditional values that define who we are.

When changes impact your family, a counselor can help you navigate your issues and improve its existing dynamics. With therapy, your family can gain a better understanding of each other’s points of view so that even when opinions differ, mutual respect is upheld.

Family Therapy Can Help You Find Common Ground

Whether it’s a new baby, remarriage, divorce, or death, family members may have difficulty adjusting to transitions. Therapy can help your family adapt to these changes by allowing each member to redefine their changing roles and, together, learn how to adapt into a stronger unit.

Counseling can be beneficial for families of all ages, cultures, genders, and living situations. By looking at your unit as a whole, your therapist will be an unbiased party that can help expose the root causes of your family’s difficulty adapting to change. They will also help you clearly define the issues that affect you most and offer more effective strategies for addressing them.

Your group sessions together will be a safe place for everyone to explore the situation at hand and test out possible solutions. To achieve the best possible outcome, each of you will be encouraged to remain engaged and to listen to one another throughout the therapeutic experience.

What To Expect In Sessions

At your initial session, it’s preferable to have all members present who are affected by whatever is impacting your family. Your therapist will connect with each of you to understand your individual perspectives on the issue. They may include an activity to get to know everyone as well as a chance for members to ask any questions they may have about the process.

In ongoing sessions, your therapist may request to meet with some members either individually or in smaller groups to address various relationship dynamics within the family. They may focus on how each of you relates to one another in stressful and peaceful situations. By helping each of you troubleshoot your interactions to see if they are helping or hindering the challenges you face, you will discover ways to build healthier relationships within the family.

The Modalities We Use

Our family counselors use different types of therapeutic modalities including Strategic Family Therapy (SFT), Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT), and a solution-focused approach. By identifying behaviors and interactions within your family’s dynamic that contribute to a child’s unwanted behavior, SFT can enable your family to overcome the issues it’s experiencing. EFFT looks at what emotional needs and wants are contributing to family dynamics and can help repair relationships between family members that can transform the family as a whole. And solutions-focused therapy will enable you to redefine your family’s challenges to include hope and goals for resolution.

In family therapy, you will be guided to face changes positively and meet everyone’s needs while still holding onto core beliefs and values. You will also learn how to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing environment. We aim to help you maintain healthy boundaries, problem solve, resolve conflict, and communicate effectively—all while fostering empathy and understanding of one another’s perspectives.

But You May Wonder Whether Therapy Is Right For Your Family…

We can’t afford family therapy.

We realize you may be concerned about the cost of therapy. However, we are committed to making it as affordable and accessible for you as possible. Unlike many private practice therapy groups, we take all major insurances as well as Medicaid. Making one person in the family the designated client allows us to bill their insurance for the service. In addition, we have interns available who charge less but still have experience dealing with family issues.

How can we go to counseling if some of our family members won’t attend?

Because the problems that develop within families don't start or end with one person, it is okay to start attending family therapy with only those members who are willing to participate. Perhaps in time, after a few family members improve their communication styles and emotional responses, it may demonstrate to any non-attending family members that counseling does work.

Everyone Can Benefit From Family Therapy

With therapy, the peace your family has been missing can be restored. If you would like to find out more about family therapy with us, you may call 513-770-1705 or visit our contact page.

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