Family Therapy
Families that are struggling with any issue that brings added stress, such as relationships, mental health, the loss of a family member, addiction, divorce, or financial problems, may benefit from family therapy.
While the individual therapist works with one individual, the family therapist views problems in the context of the “system” of the family, helping them through their challenges.
For example, having a parent who is addicted to alcohol is not a problem that can be solved on its own. The parent’s alcoholism likely harms the rest of the family as well.
A family therapist believes that problems must be addressed with the whole family rather than at a separate individual level.
Some of the issues a family may want to consider engaging the services of a qualified professional therapist are:
- Communication difficulties between family members
- Children, teenagers struggling
- Family members isolated from family life
- Family members struggling to cope with stress
- Someone in your family having difficulty functioning in their normal capacity
- The family has experienced a form of trauma, and members are finding it hard to cope
- Mental health, addiction, and eating disorders in the family
- Family members with extreme emotional reactions
On This Page
What is the Family Therapy Approach?
The family therapy approach involves treatment aimed at assisting families in resolving issues affecting their members’ mental health and relationships. Family and couples therapy can help family members improve communication, develop more successful coping strategies, and resolve issues within the family system.
Family therapy focuses on interactions between individuals in a family. Systemic therapists focus on a problem in the context of family relations and dynamics. It aims to heal the problem within a family.
What are the Three Goals of Family Therapy?
The main goal of Systemic Family Therapy is to heal any mental, emotional, or psychological problems within a family. While the specific goal largely depends on the unique circumstances of each family, the goals commonly include:
- Developing and maintaining healthy boundaries within a family
- Improving communication and assisting family members in better understanding family dynamics
- Deal with and overcome family relationship issues.
Other goals involve
- Examining how interactional patterns within a family contribute to psychopathology
- Activating the family’s internal resources
- Improving the family’s problem-solving abilities
- Providing psychoeducation to family members
- Provide support to the family member who is struggling
- Strengthening the family’s emotional health
Family therapy has proven to be extremely effective in many cases, and some of the benefits include:
- A better understanding of healthy boundaries and patterns within a family
- Improved communication between family members
- Increased empathy
- Reduced conflict within the family by gaining anger management skills
- Greater transparency between family members
- Restored trust, support, and forgiveness between family members
- Conflict resolution
- Bringing back together family members who have been isolated or have been isolating themselves
What are the Four Common Family Therapy Techniques?
Techniques involve methods family therapists use to help family members resolve conflicts by enhancing their engagement and communication. For example, in narrative family therapy, the therapist helps family members deconstruct problematic stories, share preferred stories, and listen to the individual stories of other family members.
There are many different techniques. However, the four family therapy techniques most commonly used include:
- Structural
- Bowenian
- Strategic
- Systematic
What are the Five Approaches to Family Therapy?
The five family therapy approaches involve:
- Structural
Structural therapy focuses on the interactions between family members rather than on their issues.
- Strategic Therapy
Strategic therapy has five stages:
- Social stage
- Problem stage
- Interactional stage
- Goal-setting stage
- Task-setting stage
- Communication Therapy
Communication therapy focuses on communication difficulties between couples and family members.
- Psychoeducation
Psychoeducation aims to teach persons with substance use disorders and their families to understand better how substance use affects the family and how the family impacts substance use.
- Relationship Counselling
Relationship counselling focuses on strained relationships between family members and can include parent-child, spouse-spouse, or significant other-significant other relationships within the family system.
Why Leone Centre?
Leone Centre experienced Family Therapists offer therapy in London and through Online Counselling.
Our therapists remain neutral – we don’t take sides. We help by identifying and assessing behavioural patterns within the family and by encouraging fair, balanced communication between family members.
All discussions in counselling are handled sensitively, and, of course, discussions with your therapist are always confidential.
Leone Centre provides online and in-person family therapy, as well as professional relationship therapy online and at our practices in London. To book your first meeting with one of our family therapists, call us on 020 3930 1007.
References
- Family Therapy Techniques by Dara Gasior, PsyD
- Family Interventions: Basic Priciples and Techniques by Mathew Varghese, Vivek Kirpekar and Santosh Loganathan
- An Introduction to Family Therapy by Rudi Dallos & Ros Draper
- Family Therapy Can Help by SAMHSA
Family Therapy FAQs
My son has been diagnosed with ADHD. Can family therapy help?
Family therapy can help with your son’s diagnosis of ADHD by inviting the family to sit down together and discuss any anxiety, issues, family dynamics, and an agreed plan on the best way to move forward.
What is required first is not the learning of new techniques but a change in parental attitudes as a result of gaining a deeper understanding of the child. At that point, family therapy can help both parents and children by introducing some helpful tools to ease the management of tasks that are usually difficult, including helping concentrate during school and completing homework, as well as day-to-day tasks.
Do you offer family therapy with LGBTQI+ families?
Sure! Our therapy for LGBTQI+ families can support families in reaching their own unique goals. At the Leone Centre, our family therapists can also discuss issues such as raising LGBTQI+ children, coming out, unconscious bias, discrimination, and general mental health issues and family dynamics.
I have young kids. Do you provide online family therapy?
Yes. Online family therapy can be useful for families with young children. Sessions can be held at a convenient time for the parents without worrying about childcare or travelling. The therapy can be held via an online video call (zoom) in the comfort of the family home.
How experienced are your family therapists?
Leone Centre family therapists’ have a wealth of knowledge coming from very thorough training and years of experience, all members of the Association of Family Therapy AFT and/or BACP and UKCP registered.
Most of the Leone Centre family therapists are trained at PG or Master level and have substantial work experience like working in the NHS family services, mental health services, teaching and supervising other therapists.
Due to their remarkable experience, Leone Centre family therapists are professionally fully prepared to support families facing different relational difficulties and issues such as lack of communication, bereavement and loss, constructing a new family structure after parental separation, overcoming conflict with mutual understanding, processing trauma, and supporting the whole family when a family member experiences mental and physical ill-health.
Talk with a Leone Centre Professional
If you do feel like you need some help and support, our Leone Centre professionals are available 7 days a week. Call us on 020 3930 1007. We can also provide fast track therapy.
We can offer in-person counselling in London appointments at our head office in Fulham and our offices in Kensington, Wimbledon and Belgravia, We also service Victoria, Putney, Chelsea, Knightsbridge, Mayfair, and City of London.
In addition, we offer Online Therapy appointments wherever in the world you are located, should this better fit around your existing commitments or if you are not able to attend an in-person appointment.
