What is Family Therapy?
Family therapy is a form of psychotherapy that helps a family, rather than an individual, understand and change dysfunctional familial dynamics, interaction patterns, and communication styles. Family therapy engages the entire family (whatever the configuration may be) in sessions to uncover unhealthy relating strategies, while simultaneously supporting and strengthening a family’s healthy dynamics.
Family therapy helps alleviate emotional pain within a family dynamic by working with the family as a complex relational system, and avoids blaming one family member as the origin of the family’s problems. Research shows that family therapy proves to be very effective in cases of child and adolescent problems, trauma, incest history, domestic violence history, anger management, victims of crime, and addiction in families.
What kind of help does a family therapist offer?
A family therapist helps and supports families by:
- Developing, with family members, a family history which identifies the emotional strategies a family uses to cope with difficult emotional transitions, such as divorce, separation, loss of a family member, and trauma.
- Identifying the familial rules and roles that family members have followed with or without their conscious awareness.
- Improving communication between family members.
- Strengthening healthy relational patterns.
- Evaluating how families make decisions.
- Identifying how power is exercised in a family, and helping family members learn the differences between fear and respect.
- Encouraging and promoting love, understanding, empathy, and forgiveness, while helping family members to understand the role of guilt and blame in family dynamics.
- Dissolving old wounds, and resentments that get in the way of developing healthy relational patterns.
- Helping families to heal deep wounds due to “family secrets” that cover up shame, usually present in families with a history or incest, abuse, domestic violence, victims of crime, and addiction.
- Developing a “new narrative” that supports a family to open to new ways of relating and communicating.
- Identifying how family members, consciously or unconsciously, tend to develop compensatory behaviors as a way to maintain the equilibrium of the family. Some examples include: one parent being too rigid, the other too permissive; one child being “totally responsible”, while the other is “totally irresponsible”; one family member being “too serious”, the other “not taking anything serious”; some member of the family yearning for contact and connection, while others withdraw avoiding any intimacy.
- Dealing with external stressors and changes, such as losses, death, remarriage, divorce, life transitions, cultural pressure and expectations on the family.
- Evaluating acculturation, immigration, multi-cultural, and diversity issues that might influence the ability of the family to function properly.
- Helping step-families and blended families adapt and grow as a family unit.
- Reorganizing a family as a cohesive unit that encourages individuals to be independent and interconnected at the same time.
Can we come to Family Therapy, while members of my family are in child, couples, or individual therapy?
At the Blue Oak Therapy Center, families have the advantage of a community of therapists with different theoretical backgrounds and a variety of experiences located in the same building. This enables a family to have their family sessions with one therapist, while individual family members can see another therapist for individual therapy at Blue Oak.
Our Therapists have many different specialties and theoretical backgrounds. Please call 510.649.9818 to find out whether one of our therapists has the experience, skills and training to meet your family’s needs.
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Blue Oak Therapy Center
3101 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705 Phone: (510) 649-9818
Clinical director is Stuart Sovatsky, PhD, MFT Licensed #MFC 19173.
