A two edged sword
The family unit is a remarkable living organism being the very core of our social structure. It offers so many different benefits to each and every member from their birth to their demise.
It offers a challenging as well as a rewarding environment that hones skills which remain available throughout ones entire life. A healthy interactive family life can effectively be a training ground for optimism and unrestricted sense of wellbeing.
It further provides very important opportunities to experience boundless emotional flexibility, providing individuals can learn from and survive what often is the most intense, complex, emotional, and at times hostile interpersonal challenges that family life can frequently and painfully manifest.
When families need help
When your family life is under stressful demands it may be due to a crisis that polarises family members or long standing heavily weighted issues. Family counselling is a composite and multifaceted area of therapy, and often requires multiple skills to unravel heavily weighted issues that are sometimes extremely complex. Families can consist of several combinations that require a set of broad ranged skills to treat various family types including:
- Families bound by marriage, blood or de facto
- Foster, adoptive or step families
- Mixed or culturally diverse – Extended
- Separated parents
- Same sex parent family
- Single or step parent families
All of these family types each present themselves with both common and dissimilar struggles; whatever the mix, Family Counselling is a qualified and proven intervening system that helps to initiate communal respect and honesty, these techniques are highly effective in unravelling the most simple to the most intricate dysfunctional family dynamics.
If your family unit is not functioning in a way that overcomes day to day challenges, which may include ongoing disruptive episodes that appear to be eroding family life; then it may be time to seek professional help, many of these symptoms could include:
- An inability for family members to work together
- Extensive withdrawal by a family member
- A lack of openness, difficulty in defining the disharmony or its origin
- Gradual loss of respect
- Substance abuse
- Constant unresolved arguments
- Violence
- Extended bereavement
- Behavioral issues
- Parenting concerns
Irrespective of the issue, specialist assistance is available to help family members through these difficult stages, by initiating more harmony and positive interaction with family members. If individuals progress forward by breaking these cycles, families become unstuck and emerge from repeated outdated performances.
Under the care of a trained family therapist each individual receives the care and attention to resolve issues that are important to them; the diverse methods used are non-judgemental and respectful to the views of each family member.
Ongoing clinical training is an expected practice in the mental health profession; allowing the therapist to facilitate the most effective and proven techniques in contemporary family counselling.
Phone: 08 8370 3509