Family Therapy
Individuals are often embedded within family units, and bringing the family into the therapeutic space can help facilitate healing by holistically addressing different dynamics within the family unit.
Whether it involves examining roles or exploring communication/behavioral patterns, family therapy is a space in which the therapist can serve as a mediator to bring attention to these issues and work in collaboration with your family in order to create more adaptive ways of functioning.
We may incorporate modalities such as structural family therapy, systemic family therapy, and intergenerational (Bowenian) therapy and therapeutic tools such as genograms and roleplaying.
Structural Family Therapy involves examining structures such as hierarchies, subsystems (parental vs. sibling), and boundaries within families.
The goal of this type of therapy is to work with your clinician to restructure your family system to function healthier and more cohesively by challenging and changing dysfunctional patterns.
Structural Family Therapy
Systemic Family Therapy considers the functioning of the entire family system, including patterns of behaviors and emotions. We will look at how these patterns might be creating problematic behaviors.
This modality analyzes how each member’s actions and emotions interact with and influence the family system. What one person experiences affects the entire unit, and changing one person’s role, may change the entire family dynamic.
Systemic Family Therapy
Intergenerational (Bowenian) family therapy
Intergenerational family therapy explores the impact of emotional and behavioral cycles and patterns across generations of families. It involves concepts such as triangles; where two people are pulled into a dynamic that creates alliances and avoids direct communication with others, and emotional cutoffs or over-involvement; where one distances themselves from others to avoid conflict & communication or overly enmeshes themselves with others’ emotions.
It also emphasizes concepts such as differentiation, which involves maintaining individual autonomy while also being in relationships with others to resist overinvolvement/codependence and cutoffs.
Genograms are used to map family trees with a focus on relationship dynamics and mental health patterns.
We will use various symbols to represent family members and their connections. We will also look at more specific information like physical and mental health conditions, emotional connections, and big life events. Visualizing these factors in your family unit helps your clinician see larger patterns and make connections between family members’ experiences and behaviors.