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Family Counseling
90 mins
In-person & Online session
Whether bonded by blood or by choice, family is one of the most important connections humans have with one another. With all the established connections within a family unit, good times are celebrated and on the other hand, it is not uncommon for most families to experience disagreements, stress, or conflict, in small or big ways.
Family counseling is a type of therapy designed to help with issues that specifically affect families' mental health and functioning. This suggests that families exist and work in systems rather than groups of people who function independently of each other. That being said, changes in one family member will also influence changes in other parts of the family. While family counseling is meant to address family challenges, it can also help individual family members build stronger relationships, improve communication, and manage conflicts within the family system. It’s safe to say that while some challenges are fairly easy to identify, some underlying issues could be masked by day-to-day life which are not obvious but play a significant role in how the family functions.
Some of the primary goals of family counseling are to identify and address challenges in the family, improve the communication between members of the family, learn to understand and manage challenging family situations, create a better home environment that is safe and healthy and understand the unique issues that a family might face. These issues could be emotional, psychological, or behavioral. Family counseling can teach you skills to deepen family connections and get through challenging times, even after you and your family have completed the therapy sessions. Evidence-based research has shown that family counseling effectively addresses issues with children and helps to reduce the risk of some mental health conditions in adolescents, regardless of gender.
Benefits of family counseling vary from family to family, but they can include developing healthy boundaries, improving communication, defining someone’s role within the family, improving family dynamics and relationships, providing strength and coping tools for family members, addressing unhelpful patterns of interactions and improving the family’s problem-solving abilities.
What to expect in a family counseling session:
During a family counseling session, the therapist may talk with the family as a group, as individuals, or as a combination of the two. The number of family counseling sessions depends on various factors, such as why a family is seeking help and whether family members participate during therapy.
Consider family counseling if there have been:
conflicts between siblings/family members
inconsistent parenting
marital problems
difficulty communicating or expressing emotions
financial problems or disagreements about money
changes of events and/or behaviors within the family
increase in emotional reactions within the family
significant breakdown in communication between family members
concerns about developing a functional and healthy relationship following a divorce
situations in dealing with a chronic illness or death in the family
*The list is not exhaustive.