Family therapy: Healing family conflicts

Families can be torn apart by illness, divorce or other challenges that create conflict and stress. Family therapy can help families identify and resolve problems.

Your family can be your greatest source of support, comfort and love, but it can also be your greatest source of pain and grief. When a health crisis, mental illness, work problems or teenage rebellion threaten family unity.

Family therapy can help your family weather such storms. Family therapy can help patch strained relationships, teach new coping skills and improve how your family works together. Whether it's you, your partner, a child or even a sibling or parent who is in crisis, family therapy can help all of you communicate better and learn to get along.

What is family therapy?

Family therapy is a type of psychotherapy that helps families or individuals understand and improve the way family members interact with each other and resolve conflicts.

Family therapy is often short term. You usually attend one session a week, typically for three to five months. In some cases, families may need more intensive treatment. However, the treatment plan will depend on your family's specific situation.

Who can benefit from family therapy?

In general, anyone who wants to improve troubled relationships can benefit from family therapy. Family therapy can help issues such as:

• Divorce
• Eating disorders, such as anorexia or bulimia
• Substance abuse
• Depression or bipolar disorder
• Grief, loss and trauma
• Work stress
• Parenting skills
• Emotional abuse or violence

Your family may enter family therapy along with other types of mental health treatment, especially if one of you suffers from an addiction that requires intense individual therapy.

How does family therapy work?

Family therapy often brings entire families together in therapy sessions. However, family members may also see a family therapist individually. Family therapy can even include non-family members, such as teachers, other health care providers or representatives of social services agencies.

Working with a family therapist, you and your family will examine your family's ability to solve problems and express thoughts and emotions. You may explore family roles, rules, and behavior patterns in order to recognize issues that contribute to conflict. Family therapy may help you identify your family's strengths, such as caring for one another, and weaknesses, such as an inability to confide in one other.

For example, say that your child is chemically dependent. Your family may not understand the roots of his illness or how best to offer help. Although you're worried about the health of your child, you find that a lot of your interactions can erupt into arguments. You're left with hurt feelings, decisions go unmade, and the rift grows wider.

Family therapy can help you pinpoint specific concerns and assess how your family is handling them. You will learn new ways to interact and overcome old problems. Guided by your therapist, you will set individual and family goals and work on ways to achieve them. In the end, your child may be better equipped to cope with his depression, you will better understand their needs, and you, your partner and your child may all get along better.

Family Therapy Can Help

SAMSHA explains that family therapy in substance abuse treatment can help by using the family's strengths and resources to find ways for the person who abuses alcohol or drugs to live without substances of abuse and to ameliorate the impact of chemical dependency on both the patient and the family. Family therapy can help families become aware of their own needs and aid in the goal of keeping substance abuse from moving from one generation to another.

Substance Abuse Impacts Families

• Blended families present special challenges and substance abuse can become an impediment to a step family's integration and stability.
• Siblings in a family of origin may find their needs and concerns ignored while parents react to the continuous crises involving the adolescent who abuses alcohol or drugs. If a parent also abuses substances, this can set in motion a dangerous combination of physical and emotional problems that can be very dangerous.

Family Therapy with Drug Abuse and Addiction

The role of the family when dealing with drug abuse and addiction is huge .  Family therapy can have a tremendous impact in conquering the drug abuse and addiction that has affected, most likely, every aspect of family dynamics.  It is not an easy road to travel, but when family therapy is implemented, you all can learn how to deal with drug abuse and addiction in a healthy and productive way.

Family therapy sessions are an extremely important part of the recovery process.  You may be hesitant to attend these sessions, but they can be life-affirming for not only you, but your loved one as well.

Often, the person who has the addiction is feeling alone and withdrawn from the family.  That could be the reason why he or she began using in the first place.  People who abuse drugs are looking for a way to fit in – a tool to help them be part of something when they feel alone.  That often has to do with feeling alienated from the family.

It is important to show your support when a loved one has an abuse or addiction problem with drugs. When you participate in family therapy, you are telling your loved one that you care about them and their recovery and that it is important to you.  If you find yourself resistant to participation, just remember that you are there to learn and to help. 

Family therapy can strengthen your family in ways you never considered possible.  What family can’t use a little advice and guidance when it comes to their lives?

In today’s world, dysfunction is a family dynamic that is all too common.  When you are participating in family therapy for drug abuse and addiction, you are saying that you want to change and improve that family dynamic.  You may think you have the “perfect” family, but no one really does.  A little soul searching can go a long way – especially for the family member who is struggling with abuse and addiction.

Substance abuse affects families – there’s no doubt about that.  Whether your loved one is in an inpatient or outpatient program, it is essential that you obtain family therapy for drug abuse or addiction.  You will all be much better for it, and your loved one will have an easier time becoming drug-free.