Family Counseling or Family therapy is designed to address specific problem that largely affect the psychological health of family members such as mental health condition or major life transition. Family counseling is used as the way of treatment or as a complementary approach.

Meeting with a family therapist

Family counseling are done by a licensed marriage and family therapist. Even other mental health professionals such as psychologist or professional counselors who have received formal training in family counseling may incorporate the family counseling technique into their own work.

This way of therapy is solution focused on family issues. An average of nine session is required to solve the problem of family members. Meeting are often kept once per week and it will held for 50 minutes. The members of the families who attend counselling session vary depending on therapy goals and often the therapist will conduct individual session to supplement the family sessions. Family counseling is conducted in different settings such as family counseling services, residential treatment centers and community agencies.

Types of family therapy approaches used by a therapist

• Behavioral Family Therapy
• Narrative Family Therapy

Behavioral Family therapy – This approach aim to improve the communication within a family rather than focusing on a problem. Using this type of approach, the therapist will encourage the families to focus on present and not to look for the problem in past. Families might learn to solve their problem by themselves.

Narrative Family Therapy –This approach aims to change the negative thinking that might cause him to internalize problems. The therapists make use of their strength and positive attributes to solve their problem.

Benefits of Family counseling

Family can benefit from counseling when they experience any stressful event that affects the family relationship that includes divorce, financial hardship and death of a loved person. In addition it also effective for the problem like mental health concern which affects the family as whole such as chronic illness, depression, interpersonal conflict, behavioral problem and communication problem.

Family counseling encourages the collaboration and understanding among family members in order to solve the issues of one or more individuals. For instance, if a child is facing social and academic problem, then the therapy will focus on the family pattern that supports to solve the child problem rather than focusing on evaluating child behavioral problem alone. As the family detects the root cause of the problem, they can learn to support the child by altering the condition that help to solve child unwanted behavior.