At Alive Counselling, we have a team of therapists who have their own families and love supporting families and offering Family Therapy in Kelowna/ Family Counselling in Kelowna and online. As the clinic owner and supervisor, Barb, was supervised by a world-renowned Marriage and Family Therapist so deeply appreciates Family Therapy, especially as a daughter, wife, and mother of four.

Exploring the Power of Family Therapy: Strengthening Bonds and Healing Together

In today’s fast-paced world, family dynamics can become complex and challenging. Conflicts, miscommunications, and unmet needs often arise, straining relationships and leaving family members feeling disconnected. Family therapy offers a compassionate and structured approach to navigating these challenges, helping families heal and grow stronger together. Let’s explore what family therapy is, how it works, and the profound benefits it can offer.

What is Family Therapy?

Family therapy is a type of psychological counseling that focuses on improving communication and resolving conflicts within a family unit. Unlike individual therapy, which zeroes in on one person’s issues, family therapy addresses problems within the context of family relationships. It involves all or some members of the family and aims to understand and improve how they interact with one another.

A family therapist is a trained mental health professional who facilitates this process. They use various therapeutic techniques to help family members express their feelings, understand each other’s perspectives, and develop healthier ways of interacting.

How Does Family Therapy Work?

Family therapy typically involves several stages:

1. Assessment and Understanding: The therapist begins by gathering information about the family’s history, dynamics, and current issues. This involves individual and joint sessions where each member can share their experiences and concerns.
2. Setting Goals: Together with the therapist, the family sets clear, achievable goals for the therapy process. These goals might include improving communication, resolving specific conflicts, or understanding underlying issues.
3. Working Through Issues: The therapist guides the family through various exercises and discussions aimed at addressing the identified problems. This may involve role-playing, communication skills training, or exploring family patterns and dynamics.
4. Developing Strategies: Families learn and practice new ways of interacting and solving problems. The therapist helps them develop strategies for maintaining positive changes outside of therapy sessions.
5. Review and Reflection: Periodic reviews help assess progress and make adjustments as needed. The therapist and family reflect on the changes and continue to build on their successes.

Benefits of Family Therapy

Family therapy offers numerous benefits, including:

• Improved Communication: One of the primary goals of family therapy is to enhance communication. Family members learn to express their thoughts and feelings more openly and listen to each other more effectively.
• Conflict Resolution: By addressing conflicts constructively, family therapy helps families find solutions and resolve disputes in a healthy way, reducing the likelihood of recurring issues.
• Strengthened Relationships: Therapy fosters understanding and empathy among family members, leading to stronger, more supportive relationships.
• Enhanced Problem-Solving Skills: Families develop better problem-solving skills and strategies for dealing with challenges together.
• Emotional Support: Family therapy provides a safe space for family members to share their emotions and support one another, strengthening the emotional bonds within the family.
• Increased Awareness: Families gain insight into their dynamics and patterns of behavior, which can lead to greater self-awareness and personal growth for each member.

Who Can Benefit from Family Therapy?

Family therapy is beneficial for a wide range of families and situations, including:

• Families experiencing ongoing conflict or tension
• Families dealing with a major life transition or crisis
• Families with a member struggling with mental health or addiction issues
• Families seeking to improve communication and strengthen bonds
• Blended families or those experiencing difficulties in integrating new family members

Finding the Right Family Therapist

Choosing the right family therapist is crucial for a successful therapy experience. Look for a licensed professional with experience in family therapy, and consider their approach and style to ensure it aligns with your family’s needs and values. A good therapist will create a supportive environment where all family members feel heard and respected.

Conclusion

Family therapy is a powerful tool for healing and strengthening family relationships. By improving communication, resolving conflicts, and fostering understanding, it helps families build healthier and more supportive connections. If your family is facing challenges or seeking to enhance its dynamics, consider exploring the benefits of family therapy. Together, you can work towards a more harmonious and fulfilling family life.

How Family Therapy Works

Table of Contents

• Types of Family Therapy
• Techniques
• Uses
• Benefits
• Effectiveness
• Things to Consider
• How to Get Started

Family therapy is a type of treatment designed to help with issues that specifically affect families’ mental health and functioning. It can help individual family members build stronger relationships, improve communication, and manage conflicts within the family system. By improving how family members interact and relate to one another, family therapy can foster change in close relationships.

Some of the primary goals of family therapy are to create a better home environment, solve family issues, and understand the unique issues that a family might face.¹

Types of Family Therapy

There are several types of family therapy. A few that you might encounter include:¹

• Family systems therapy: This type is an approach that focuses on helping people utilize the strengths of their relationships to overcome mental health problems.
• Functional family therapy: This is a short-term treatment often utilized for young people experiencing problems with risky behavior, violence, or substance use. It helps teens and families look for solutions while building trust and respect for each individual.
• Narrative family therapy: This type encourages family members to each tell their own story to understand how those experiences shape who they are and how they relate to others. By working with this narrative, the person can start to view problems more objectively than just seeing things through their own narrow lens.
• Psychoeducation: This type of treatment is centered on helping family members better understand mental health conditions. By knowing more about medications, treatment options, and self-help approaches, family members can function as a cohesive support system. 
• Supportive family therapy: This type of therapy focuses on creating a safe environment where family members can openly share what they are feeling and get support from their family.

Some therapists may stick with a specific type of family therapy. In contrast, others may take a more eclectic, multimodal approach that incorporates aspects of different types of treatment to suit the needs of the family.

What Is Bowenian Family Therapy?

Techniques

The techniques utilized in family therapy typically depend on factors such as the theoretical orientation of the therapist and the specific needs of the family. Some methods that may be utilized include:

• Behavioral techniques: These methods often focus on skills training and psychoeducation to help family members address specific problems. For example, modeling and role-playing might be used to help family members resolve communication problems.
• Psychodynamic techniques: These methods involve assessing how each family member interprets and responds to the problems they are facing. The therapist works with the family to develop new emotional insights and explore new ways of responding more effectively.
• Structural techniques: These methods focus on helping family members with boundaries and power dynamics within the family. Such techniques can help families create new boundaries and establish routines that improve how the family functions.

Techniques used in family therapy focus on improving emotional awareness, assisting with major changes within a family, helping people accept things they cannot control, and improving communication and collaboration.

Other specific techniques used in family therapy may include learning to practice empathy, emotional validation, reflective listening, and cognitive reframing.²

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What Family Therapy Can Help With

Family therapy can help people with many different issues. Some of these include:

• Behavioral problems in children or teens
• Changes within the family 
• Communication problems
• Death of loved one
• Divorce, separation, or marital problems
• Parent-child conflicts
• Problems between siblings
• Parenting issues
• Stressful events or major life transitions
• Trauma

This type of therapy can also address individual mental health problems that can affect the entire family, such as anxiety, chronic illness, depression, and substance use.¹

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Benefits of Family Therapy

Because this form of treatment addresses communication, family members can learn how to better share their thoughts and needs and resolve conflicts in a way that is less likely to damage relationships.²

This type of therapy also focuses on how family members can address an individual family member’s difficulties. For example, if one family member has a mental health condition, family therapy can help alter some conditions that sometimes contribute to the problem.

When individuals are affected by mental illness, family members may sometimes lack awareness of how to help. As a result, they may engage in behaviors that maintain or even worsen aspects of the illness.¹ Family therapy can help members of the family learn more about what they can do to support their family member who has a mental disorder while preserving their own mental well-being.

What Is Filial Therapy?

Effectiveness

Research suggests that family therapy can be effective for a range of purposes. Some supporting evidence includes:

• A 2018 review found that family therapy could be useful in treating adult-focused problems, including relationship distress, intimate partner violence, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, psychosis, alcohol issues, and adjustment to chronic physical illness.³
• A 2019 study found that family therapy helped improve different areas of family functioning to help teens who were experiencing mental health problems.⁴
• One 2019 review found that family therapy demonstrated effectiveness in treating conduct problems, emotional problems, eating disorders, somatic problems, and recovery from abuse or neglect. The study also found that it was useful either when utilized independently or as part of a multimodal treatment program.⁵

Further research is needed to better understand how family therapy may be most effective and how it compares to other forms of treatment.

Things to Consider

Because family therapy involves talking about emotional problems and conflicts, it can be difficult and upsetting. In some cases, people may initially feel worse before they begin to improve. It is important to remember that a professional therapist is there to help members of the family work through these conflicts and handle the intense emotions that people may experience.

While family therapy can be useful for various issues, that doesn’t mean it is right for everyone or every situation. Some other types of treatment that may also be useful include cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or child psychotherapy.

How to Get Started

Family therapy is often short-term, but it may also take place for a year or longer, depending on the situation and needs of the family. While it frequently involves all family unit members, it may also focus on those who are willing or able to participate in treatment. 

During therapy sessions, the therapist will ask questions to learn more about the problems that have brought the family to therapy. They will also look at other factors contributing to issues, such as underlying mental health conditions and environmental stress.

This type of therapy is often provided by licensed marriage and family therapists (LMFT), but it can also be practiced by other mental health professionals including licensed professional counselors, psychologists, and social workers.

If you are interested in trying family therapy, it can be helpful to ask your doctor for a referral or look for professionals in your area who specialize in this type of therapy. You can also search the online directory at the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy website.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd
Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the “Everything Psychology Book.”

What Is Family Counseling?

How it works and how it can benefit your family.

KEY POINTS

• Family counselling addresses the dynamics of families as well as individual problems within a family context.
• Licensed marriage and family therapists have specialized education and licensure.
• Research finds family counselling to be among the most effective types of therapy.

S

Family counseling is a discipline of therapy focused on finding solutions for the challenges and complexities that may arise in family life. Also called marriage and family therapy (MFT), clinicians work to improve communication among family members and adjust the dynamics between members of the family that may result in dysfunction. The terms “family counseling” and “family therapy” are often used synonymously, but it is important to note that family counseling, like other forms of counseling, may be defined by some clinicians as shorter in duration and more solutions-focused than family therapy.

How It Started

Family counseling began in the 1950s and ‘60s with the work of psychiatrists and theorists Salvador Minuchin, Murray Bowen, and others. Minuchin began his career as a psychoanalyst, but after working with children, he departed from the process-oriented discipline in favor of a results-based approach.

Minuchin wanted to address families as a unit, which bucked the individual-centric approaches of therapy to date. Further, he emphasized pragmatic changes that a clinician could help families make, as opposed to simply focusing on the origin of the family’s issues.

What Are the Modalities and Methods

Family counseling has evolved and developed over the decades and now incorporates practices and methods from several schools of therapy:

Family Systems Therapy: This modality, pioneered by Bowen, visualizes the family as a complex, interconnected system and seeks to identify and make clear how the behavior of any individual in the familial group affects the other members.

Structural Family Therapy: This method examines the rules and power dynamics of the family. In structural family therapy, the therapist may be more involved than other types of treatment and help to reorganize the structures of the family to improve how people feel in the family and create a more cohesive unit.

Cognitive Behavioral Couples Therapy: Applying the same principles as cognitive behavioral therapy, this modality encourages couples to identify and name the patterns of behavior causing them or their partner distress in the relationship, with the clinician teaching skills to help confront and change these patterns.¹

Couples and Marriage Counseling: This approach focuses on relationship problems. Therapists typically meet with both partners at the same time to identify the challenges they face and disagreements they may have and help the couple find better solutions for how to communicate, find mutually acceptable solutions, and work as a team.

Trends in Family Therapy/ Family Counselling

Family therapy has expanded in popularity significantly in recent years. One study found that as many as 70 percent of psychotherapists now offer treatment to couples or families.

Research has also found family counseling to be one of the most effective forms of therapy. According to researcher Jay Lebow, writing in 2022², 70 to 80 percent of those in couples therapy felt better at the end of treatment compared to those who did not attend couples therapy, “an improvement rate that rivals or exceeds the most effective psychosocial and pharmacological interventions for individual mental health disorders.”

Family counseling has expanded recently to encompass more than heterosexual, nuclear families as the composition of families has evolved. Many practitioners now specialize in treating LGBTQ+ couples and families with an emphasis on cultural competency.

Whatever the makeup of the family unit, learning and practicing the skills of respectful communication, mutual understanding, and harmonious conflict resolution have made a difference in the lives of many families across the world.

References

Norman B Epstein, Le Zheng, Cognitive-behavioral couple therapy, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 13, 2017, Pages 142-147, ISSN 2352-250X.

Lebow, J., & Snyder, D. K. (2022). Couple therapy in the 2020s: Current status and emerging developments. Family Process, 61(4), 1359-1385.