FAMILY THERAPY

Family Therapy For When Family Life Gets Hard

Since the first family left the Garden of Eden to your family today, families have been challenging and filled with problems. That’s what family therapy is here for. Does any of this sound like your family right now? Your family is experiencing a rough patch. You’re going through the loss of a family member. Someone in the family is suffering from substance abuse. There are issues between parents such as parenting issues or going through a separation or divorce. There are financial pressures. A teenager is having behavior issues such as anger outbursts or defiance. There is a sibling conflict. Your family is in transition, blending in stepparents and stepchildren. Sound familiar?

If so, your home may be a minefield right now. Any little thing can set things off. Closeness and open communication seem impossible. The “elephant” is always in the room. Even though you love one another, you don’t know how to be with each other right now. This is so hard because your family is home base, and when your home base is shaken, where else can you go? So, you may be feeling hopeless, uncertain if there’s a way out of this unpleasant place.

Family Therapy Because Families Aren’t Easy

Everyone knows that families are important. God personally created the family as the foundation of social order. It’s also the foundation of each family member’s mental, emotional, and spiritual health. If the family suffers, everyone in the family suffers. As hard as we try to make our family healthy and happy, life has a way of intruding into our family bubble. As much as we try not to, because we are imperfect sinners, we make mistakes with our family. We bring our flaws and our past into our family so that we unintentionally damage our children and one another. And even if we were perfect people with a perfect home, outside influences can cause behavioral, emotional, or mental issues to develop in our children. On top of that, the pressures of life in a fallen world weigh on the family dynamic: the death of a family member, loss of a job, marital tensions, substance abuse, and so forth. All of this can shake the foundation of any family. That’s when family therapy is needed.

Family Therapy Can Help

Sometimes a parent will say, “Our son is having problems and he needs help.” He probably does, and family therapy can be used in addition to individual counseling. But because families are systems, for family members to be healthy, the family system must be addressed. A wise man once said, “If the flower is sick, tend the flower bed.”

Family therapy is not about finding the bad guy and assigning blame. In fact, blaming and shaming are not allowed in family therapy. Family therapy is about exploring the dynamics in “the flower bed” that are causing the issues you are facing, and addressing them with empathy and compassion to help you repair and reconnect with one another. Once you are in connection, your family will be able to do what families do best, solve your problems together.

What Happens In Family Therapy?

family therapy - family in counseling session

Your family therapy counselor is trained to examine patterns in the relationships between family members to try and create more secure bonds and promote trust so that all family members will move in a healthier, more positive direction. In family therapy, the focus is on the system, not on the identified family member that is manifesting the problem. Think of the family system like you think of your immune system. When a cold virus invades your body, your immune response system comes online and begins to fight the invading virus. That is manifested in a runny nose or a fever, among other symptoms. But even though your stuffy nose or fever is manifesting the problem, it is not the problem. The problem is the virus that has affected the entire system. Your nose and high temperature are just letting you know that there is something wrong within your body’s system.

In Emotionally Focused Therapy, we take a systems approach and look for what is going wrong in the system that is causing one member to be the symptom bearer. In Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, the parent is helped to become a safe haven and a secure base for the child, who is then able to stay emotionally regulated and nonreactive in the face of difficulty. The relationship between parent and child is transformed in a way that fosters flexibility and growth in the child or teen, and gives the parent a sense of confidence in their ability to understand and reach their child internally.

Does Family Therapy Work?

At SoulCare Counseling, we use a counseling therapy model called Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). A form of EFT is EFFT, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, and it is the most effective form of therapy for families. Its success is backed up by science, with improvements in relationships reported in 90% of cases. If you will make the commitment and work with an EFT therapist, the scientific data is on your side. The research data on EFT demonstrates that it is a proven therapy model. Your EFT therapist will join with you, will enter into understanding your family’s experience, and will work hard to help your family repair and reconnect and rebuild your relationship so you can manage whatever you’re facing.

Common Objections To Family Therapy

“We can fix this ourselves.”

People see other families who have it all together and think that they should be able to do the same. But what they see from the outside isn’t always the reality with other families. Families are good at hiding their problems and putting on a good face for the world. The fact is that all families have problems. Often there are generational family dynamics and ways of relating and behaving that make it nearly impossible to solve problems without outside help.

“Going to family therapy is admitting that we’ve failed.”

That is shame talking. Shame lies to you and says, “If you ask for help, it means you’ve failed as a father, mother, son, or daughter.” Shame is a powerful prison. But, like Jesus said, “The truth will make you free.” The truth is that going to family therapy doesn’t mean you’ve failed; it means you had the wisdom and courage to get your family the help it needs. Actually, not getting help would be a failure; but getting help is a strategy for success. Every winning athlete has a coach!

“In therapy, the parents will get blamed.”

That’s not how counseling actually works. Counselors should not shame or blame. In Emotionally Focused Therapy, there is only one enemy: the negative conflict cycle that the clients are stuck in. And we work with families to identify that cycle, understand your true needs, and communicate them in a way that will be received. When that happens, families repair, reconnect and, in that connection, they can solve any problem.

“It will be too hard to get our whole family to every session.”

Your whole family probably won’t be asked to attend every counseling session. Some sessions will be with the whole family, and some sessions will be with one or two members of the family. But whether it’s the whole family or one member of the family, the goals and the process are the same.

Family Therapy Can Help…Why Wait?

Emotionally Focused Therapy for families can help any family where one or more people are dealing with issues such as lack of trust, anger, fear, or betrayal. It can work where one or more family members are chronically or terminally ill, or when a family is separating. It can also help individual family members deal with the effects of anxiety, depression, and trauma as a result of family conflict.

If you are ready to get help for your family and get on the road to a healthy, safe, and secure connection, contact us today. To schedule a free thirty-minute consultation to see if Family Therapy can work for you, use the contact link, call or text 817-808-2606, or email info@soulcarecounselingdfw.com.

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