Family therapy is intended for two or more family members, as opposed to individual therapy that focuses on just one person. Family therapy can include a whole family or just those members of the family who require assistance with a specific problem or a chronic difficulty in relating to each other and living in harmony. Family therapy can include young children, teenagers, and grown children and their parents.

In family therapy sessions, the emphasis is on taking turns to respectfully listen to each other talk about a problem as openly as possible in a safe and neutral environment with the therapist as a referee or facilitator. Problems in families are often rooted in communication problems, so during a session I may point out observations about the way a family is communicating with each other in order to create a break in the repetitive pattern.

One assumption in psychodynamic family therapy is that we may unconsciously repeat patterns from our pasts without knowing that we are doing so, including behaviours that are self-defeating and hurtful to the people we love the most. One aspect of my role is to point out these repetitive patterns, in order to bring awareness to things that the family were not previously aware of. This new insight is one step towards creating change in individuals and in the family system itself.

Since psychodynamic family therapy is essentially a developmental therapy (the present depends and is predicted by the past), a portion of time is spent exploring the collective past of the family as well as the individual pasts of its members. One of the assumptions in all of my.work is that all behaviour has meaning. It is never just biological, but is in fact deeply experiential and carries meaning in the context of our own lives and history, and this meaning can be discovered through careful history-taking and exploration of how the past became the present. Few people understand how the family we grew up in can influence who we choose as a partner, how we interact with that partner, and how we relate to our children. Understanding these patterns is essential to clarifying the present circumstance we find ourselves in and creating the possibility for a different future.

Family therapy can be especially useful with adolescents or children who are open enough to talk about their feelings in front of their parents. It is also very productive for families going through a divorce or separation, and with newly blended families.

Consult Andrew Guthrie for the best Family Therapy near Yorkville.