Table of Contents
What is family therapy in mental health?
Family therapy: A type of psychotherapy designed to identify family patterns that contribute to a behavior disorder or mental illness and help family members break those habits. Family therapy involves discussion and problem-solving sessions with the family. Goals of Family Therapy Develop and maintain healthy boundaries. Facilitate cohesion and communication. Promote problem-solving by a better understanding of family dynamics. Psychodynamic Counseling is probably the most well-known counseling approach. Rooted in Freudian theory, this type of counseling involves building strong therapist–client alliances. The goal is to aid clients in developing the psychological tools needed to deal with complicated feelings and situations. Working with a psychologist, therapist, or counselor in a therapeutic relationship gives you an opportunity to explore your thoughts, feelings, and patterns of behavior. It can also help you learn new coping skills and techniques to better manage daily stressors and symptoms associated with your diagnosis. The process of therapy may cause you to experience uncomfortable or painful feelings, such as sadness, guilt, anxiety, anger, or frustration. Counseling may bring up painful memories. It might disrupt relationships.
What are four common family therapy techniques?
There are numerous family therapy techniques, but four main models dominate the spectrum. This blog reviews the main therapy family techniques: structural, Bowenian, strategic and systematic. Family therapy can be short term (12 sessions, on average), dealing with immediate issues, or long term (months or years), dealing with mental health conditions and/or complex issues. Together, your family and therapist will determine the goals of treatment and arrangements for how often and how long you’ll meet. Therapy can give us useful tools to strengthen our relationships. It can teach us how to identify unhelpful patterns, better address conflict, and communicate clearer. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to help us work through relationship issues. There are five different parts to strategic therapy including a brief social stage, the problem stage, interactional stage, the goal-setting stage and the task-setting stage.