What is therapy?
Therapy is the process of working with a therapist to understand problems causing emotional and psychological distress and work to resolve them by changing thoughts, behaviours and emotions. There are different types of therapies, including individual, couple and family.
Family Therapy
Family therapy is different to individually focused therapy in that it addresses the behaviours of all family members and the way these behaviours affect not only individual family members, but also relationships between family members and the family unit as a whole. Family therapists work with a range of concerns, including mental health concerns, grief and loss, and adolescent behavioural problems to explore how these affect the family system.
Family therapy can help you overcome:
- Mental health concerns
- Overcoming grief and loss
- Adolescent behavioural problems
I support family members to share understandings and views with each other, with the aim of identifying and interrupting unhelpful patterns in family interactions, creating patterns that are more helpful and strengthening family relationships.
"I work with you to unlock possibilities"
How family therapy can help you:
- Receive support and experience growth during challenging times.
- Help you identify and understand negative communication patterns that interrupt emotional closeness and satisfaction in your relationship.
- Restore, repair and develop more open and secure emotional connections.
- Learn strategies for repairing and enhancing friendship and love in your relationship.
- Develop a deeper sense of closeness and satisfaction in your relationship.
What should I Expect in family therapy?
In family therapy, the preference is for the therapist to begin the family therapy by meeting with all members of the immediate family. Subsequent sessions may involve working with different subsystems (for example, the parent subsystem) in the family depending on the work that needs to be done.
The first session is generally for the therapist to get to know the family, find out what has brought the family to family therapy, and to observe the family dynamics. Questions will be asked by the family therapist to get an understanding of relationships in the family and identify nodal points in the family’s timeline.
Ideally, therapy is terminated when the problem that you pursued therapy for becomes more manageable or is resolved. Some challenges can be more complex and take longer to resolve.