What Are The Goals of Family Therapy?

Every person’s motivation to participate in therapy is personal and specific. Psychologists and individuals participating in therapy will work closely and carefully to identify goals, and to support progress along the way. When families participate in therapy together, that goal-identifying process is especially important to try to ensure that everyone participating is committed to the same objective.

What are the goals of family therapy?

To help families cope with stressors

Families are often motivated to participate in therapy as a family due to a negative stressor. Some of the most common stressors that lead families to therapy are: addictions, behaviour problems, illness of a child, and mental health problems.

The goal of family therapy in Calgary is not to eliminate the stressors, but to help the family to work through them in a way that leaves the family stronger rather than fractured. Developing stronger and healthier patterns for family relationships starts with recognizing and accepting the family’s circumstances as they are. Therapists working with families don’t look past the present to focus on change to create a stress-free world. Rather, therapists help the family to understand the present — including all the stressors the family is experiencing — and the toll each stressor takes on every family member as they try to relate to each other.

Family therapy with a psychologist in Calgary moves from an honest understanding and assessment of the present toward an intentional process of developing ways to cope individually, react to each other, and understand each other’s experience of the family’s stressors going forward.

To improve the functioning of the family unit as a whole

Families are made up of a complex and shifting set of relationships that each need to be balanced if the family — as a whole — is to remain healthy. The web of relationships includes parents and children, but also extends to grandparents, aunts and uncles, girlfriends and boyfriends, foster and adopted children, and even caregivers.

Trauma or harm suffered by an individual in that web, or by any small subset of relationships within that web, can quickly reach throughout the entire family. Family therapy guided by a psychologist near you is often a complement to individual or couples therapy that members of the family may engage in on their own. Family therapists recognize and help families to identify, understand, and adjust to the family-wide impacts of personal struggles such as addiction, illness (physical and mental), or abuse.

To address specific challenges

Stressors such as mental and physical illness, addictions, and behaviour problems are very common drivers for families who participate in family therapy in Calgary. Psychologists in Calgary support families going through therapy for a wide range of more specific situations, however.

Therapy that includes participation by members of the entire family can address: pre-marital issues (particularly involving the blending of families); marriage therapy (particularly where the couple’s marriage is stressed by children, parents, or other family relationships); specific communications issues; grief (grief counselling can be a part of family therapy, or family therapy can complement grief counseling received by individual family members); and conflict resolution (whether between partners or spouses, siblings, or between parents and children).

One often overlooked area of family interactions is families who work or own businesses together. Family therapy can be a useful adjunct to business and succession planning, particularly where the business relationships need to be sustained throughout non-business-related stressors, trauma, fractures, or generational changes.

Are you experiencing personal issues that are impacting your family? Is your family struggling with individual or shared stressors? Do you and your family members have plans and goals that are being frustrated by circumstances causing division and tension? Consider participating in family therapy in Calgary. Psychologists in Calgary are a resource that can help your family through the stressors it is facing — individually and together.