Family & Relationship Therapy
Helping Couples and Families
Through Life's Challenges
WHO NEEDS A COUPLE AND FAMILY THERAPIST?
Having a therapist trained in couple and family therapy is especially helpful for people who struggle with relating to others. Couple and family therapists can treat individuals — as well as any relationship within a family, a family as a whole, and couples (regardless of marital status). Couple and family therapists use a systems approach which helps them to identify patterns of communication and behaviors that are harmful to the people in a relationship. From there, we help people learn and practice new ways of interacting that are healthy, fulfilling, and nurturing. Common issues addressed in relational work include family stress from mental illness, frequent fights or conflict, feeling lonely or abandoned, being ‘stuck’ or frustrated as a parent, feeling unable to be close to others, needing to change family behavior but not knowing how, and repairing hurt from past betrayals.
ISSUE-SPECIFIC TREATMENT
Evidence-based treatments exist in the world of relational therapy too. Relational therapy at BWCC mainly draws from Brief Strategic Family Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, Gottman-informed interventions, Emotion-Focused Therapy, and Functional Analytic Psychotherapy. These therapies are well-researched and have scientifically supported outcomes. Therapy will be targeted to the issues you want to address and our therapist emphasizes creating a solid, safe, trustworthy relationship in order to meet those goals. The processes of ongoing assessment, collaborative treatment planning, and requesting feedback will be used to make sure that the interventions and therapeutic relationship are helping you make healthy changes.
Our therapists have experience treating these issues:
- Infidelity (cheating)
- Couples conflict
- Family conflict
- Divorce mediation & individual therapy
- Premarital counseling
- Parenting help & education
- Healing from abuse & domestic violence
- Healing from sexual assault & sexual abuse
- Family stress from mental illness
- Grief & loss
- Family life transitions
- Crisis pile-up
- Social anxiety
- Low self-esteem
- Feeling isolated and alone
WHAT IS THERAPY LIKE?
Relational therapy can be the main approach for your therapy, or you can ask for supplemental sessions to help your individual work. For couples and families seeking help, the therapist will usually work with you as a group, including multiple people in the sessions. For individuals, the therapist may ask questions about the relationships you currently have, and past relationships as well. The role of a therapist in couple and family work is not to take sides or “fix” certain people in the family. Instead, the therapist will help you identify or rethink the problem you are coming in for, consider how each person is both helping the situation and making it worse, and introduce new ways to handle it together. Relational work often involves both interactive activities and time for talking and discussion.
At BWCC we take care in doing consultation and assessment with all clients, so that therapy can be more effective for you. The first three sessions include a consultation (usually with our Director) and assessments done with your therapist. You can request relational therapy when you call our front office to schedule your first appointment.
FEATURED ARTICLES
Read some featured articles from the BWCC Clinical Director, Dr. Monnica Williams at Psychology Today:
Call us to schedule an appointment today.