What Should I Expect from Family Therapy
Your therapist has recommended that you participate in family therapy. Or you’re looking for a mediator because you’ve had enough of the ongoing disagreements. In either case, Family therapy can be uncharted territory for many individuals.
What can you anticipate?
First, ensure that the therapist you choose has experience working with families. Without formal education or experience in family therapy, many people set up retail therapy as “generalists” and advertise their services to the public. You don’t see a family doctor for severe illnesses like cancer or diabetes. Similarly, you wouldn’t take your family to a general practitioner for medical care.
Counseling a family is a different task than working with an individual client. Your loved ones are priceless. This calls for a therapist with extensive expertise and training in family counseling.
Second, know that your family therapist will look at the whole picture. They’ll take a holistic view of your family and work with you as a unit. Effective intervention in relationships is at the heart of family therapy. Both the person and their social contexts are taken into account. Two core beliefs inform family therapy’s basic approach to intervention design:
- The decisions and actions of one individual can have far-reaching effects on the life of their close relatives.
- A person’s ability to have fulfilling relationships with others depends on their ability to act responsibly and consider the effects of their actions on all of the significant others in their life.
Third, the therapist’s attention will be directed more toward the family’s dynamic than toward any single member who has been “identified as the patient.” In family therapy, it is common for one person to be singled out as the “patient” or “problem,” with the rest of the family coming in to “fix” them. That’s not how psychotherapy with families is supposed to go. The therapist’s job is to help the family as a whole, so they’ll look at how everyone gets along and communicates with one another. The therapist may achieve this by including the thoughts and feelings of each family member.
Fourth, the therapist working with your family will focus on building on your strengths. While you may have decided to seek therapy to address what you see as a problem, it’s important to remember that your loved ones are more than just that. Your family therapist’s job is to assist you in identifying your family’s strengths and internal resources so that you may put them to use.
Fifth, the family therapist will likely try to draw out and validate your feelings. “State-dependent learning,” or the belief that people learn best about emotions while in emotional states, is a central tenet of family therapy. Emotions are significant in family therapy because of their significance in relationships. You shouldn’t just brush them off as unimportant. Instead, it’s necessary to unearth them. When making positive changes in one’s family, the emotional realm is ground zero.
Sixth, the therapist will listen carefully to the stories you tell about your family and will be on the lookout for any unusual conclusions that might be drawn. The self-narratives we tell ourselves have the potential to be either restricting or liberating. The family therapist will question restrictive narratives and encourage the development of more uplifting ones.
Finally, you may anticipate that the family therapist will share your goal of higher family efficiency. The role of the family therapist is to support and encourage your goals for better family communication and interaction. To learn more about Family therapy New York, give us a call or shoot us an email!
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