Our family therapists only conduct one type of psychotherapy at a time to prevent conflicts of interest. Your family therapist is focused on a treatment plan that is beneficial to you and your family members. For the family therapist, your family is the “patient.” The therapist cannot hold any information shared by one family member as confidential from other family members.

Your individual therapist may provide some family sessions to stabilize your family in a crisis situation. Once the crisis has passed, your individual therapist will refer you to a family therapist for continued family treatment.

You or your other family members may be seeing other therapists while participating in family therapy. If you would like your family therapist to speak with your individual therapist, please sign a release of information to allow your therapists to communicate with one another.

Family systems therapy may be most helpful if you and your family are experiencing a stressful life event or a crisis together. This stressful event may be a difficult life transition that the family is going through, significant conflicts among your family members, or a painful loss of one of your family members.

Your family therapist is there to help you and your family get through this difficult time and find a new way of relating to one another in a stable and rewarding way. This stability replaces stress and despair with calmness and comfort.

Family-focused therapy may be most helpful if you or a family member has a serious psychological disorder. Families often find that coping with a spouse, parent, or child with a serious psychological disorder, can be extremely stressful or confusing. If drugs or alcohol are also involved, the emotional toll on other family members can skyrocket.

Family-focused therapy is an effective, evidence-based treatment specifically designed to address these issues. Family-focused therapy is highly structured and includes:

Psychoeducation: The patient and family members learn about the patient’s diagnosis, symptoms, cause of illness, medications, and factors the predict good and poor prognosis
Communication Skills Training: The patient and family members learn to increase constructive, positive, and effective communications and to decrease destructive and harmful communications
Problem-Solving Skills: The patient and family members learn effective ways of solving problems that arise from having an ill family member

Family therapy is not a primary form of treatment and is recommended in addition to individual therapy and perhaps other types of therapy such as group therapy and medication management.