Family Therapy
Family Therapy
Working with the whole family system
Families are systems. When one person is struggling, others are affected; when relationships within the family are strained, individuals often feel it as personal symptoms. Family therapy is the work of understanding the family as a whole — its patterns, its strengths, its unspoken rules — and helping it function more healthily.
Unlike individual therapy, family therapy includes more than one person in the room (or on screen). Depending on what you’re working on, this might mean both parents, a parent and a child, siblings, or three generations meeting together. Your therapist will discuss the right configuration with you before sessions begin.
Common reasons families come in
- A child or adolescent who is struggling — with mood, anxiety, behaviour, school or peer relationships — and the impact on the rest of the family
- A family member living with a serious mental illness, and how the whole family can support recovery without being depleted
- Adult-child conflicts, including around marriage, career, or life choices
- Caring for an ageing parent or relative, and shared decision-making between adult siblings
- Separation, divorce, blended families or step-parenting
- Bereavement, illness or other significant changes affecting everyone
- Long-standing communication patterns that no one seems able to break
How sessions typically work
In your first session, your therapist hears from each family member about why you’ve come and what each person hopes for. From there, the work might involve direct communication exercises in the room, exploration of patterns going back to earlier generations, problem-solving around specific issues, or simply creating a space where conversations that haven’t been possible can finally happen.
We draw on systemic family therapy, structural family therapy, and narrative approaches — choosing the methods that fit the family in front of us, not imposing a one-size-fits-all framework.
Practical details
Duration: Typically 50–60 minutes per session, depending on how many people attend
Frequency: Usually fortnightly, sometimes monthly. Acute situations may need weekly sessions early on.
Who attends: Whoever is most central to the issue. Sometimes the therapist will recommend a few “sub-system” sessions — for example, both parents alone, or just siblings — before bringing the whole family back together.
Mode: In person or online; hybrid often works particularly well when family members live in different cities.
Is family therapy the same as having a child see a therapist?
No — they’re different things. Child or adolescent individual therapy focuses on the young person directly. Family therapy looks at the whole system around them. Often the most helpful approach is both, running in parallel — and we can coordinate this for you.