What is Family Therapy?

Family therapy with me

I will help you, your partner, sibling/s, child/ren or parent/s to explore your relationship/s and appreciate each other in a new way.  It will strengthen your understanding of yourself and your relationships, and will lead to affirmation of that particular relationship or enable you to part company amicably with that significant other.  Whatever the outcome, you will complete the therapy feeling understood, strengthened and clearer about the way forward.   

Family therapy is not about blaming or shaming family members or about highlighting problems and difficulties.  It is a strength-based approach that seeks to help families work through problems and difficulties together and work towards change. It does not focus on individuals but on how family members interact with each other, and how they are understood and experienced by each other.

Families generally want something to be different and change can occur quite rapidly once the therapy has started.

What is Systemic Psychotherapy

Also known as family therapy and offers a way of helping people to explore their relationships and unpick unhelpful patterns of interaction that have developed over time, helping them to identify what is creating the disharmony. It is a mode of therapy that brings together a range of theoretical approaches concerned with emotional attachment; communication; transgenerational patterns; family beliefs; individual and family narratives; solution focused ideas and family structure.

Therapy may look at:

  • Patterns of communication

  • Emotional styles of attachment

  • Behaviour and its meaning

  • Family beliefs

  • Transgenerational influences

  • The influence of cultural, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and related factors...

Family therapy can help individuals and families enjoy healthy relationships that are sufficiently robust to ride day-to-day pressures of family life, as well as the emotional storms of losses and separations that can arise in the course of the family life cycle.

The process of therapy invites families to think about what is going well in the family and what is going awry, and what they would like to be different.  As the therapist I work alongside families to help them explore these issues and facilitate conversations and activities that will challenge the status quo and bring about the desired changes.