Are you and your partner fighting more than usual? Is your child exhibiting unusual behaviors? It might be time to consider family therapy.
Therapy is a constructive way to examine families that may have gotten off track. The process of talking things out with an objective professional can alleviate stresses, address troublesome issues, and provide actionable tactics to make things better.
You can benefit from family therapy if you and your loved ones are experiencing any of the following situations.
Divorce
If you and your spouse are on the verge of divorce, think about talking to a therapist before you go to a lawyer.
Long term relationships often go through ups and downs as we go through different life stages like parenthood and aging. Sometimes couples need a little help learning how to navigate these challenges.
Many couples might prolong their failing marriages without seeking help because they might fear confrontation. If these couples don’t seek help or don’t have a conversation about their relationship, it could lead to a very messy end. Several relationships become strained, complicated, or downright malicious when divorce proceedings are going on. Each party could become hell-bent on bringing the other down, with some individuals hiring private detectives to uncover incriminating evidence about their spouse, all to get a larger cut of the assets. People might even have to look into services that offer commercial and residential sweeping for bugging devices, to ensure that their spouse is not covertly surveilling them. If couples seek help when their marriage is in a rocky place, or even make a mutual decision to end their relationship with compassion and understanding, they might have a much smoother end to the marriage.
Therapy can help married couples look at their relationship and assess clearly whether they want to work things out or if they want to consider separating. While the legalities of this process is usually best left to professional attorneys like those at CJB Law, considering therapy separately can be of immense benefit and provide relief to both parties. It can also help children of a rocky marriage, by providing them with tools to cope with the emotions involved and ways to voice their feelings.
However, if therapy doesn’t seem to be helping you and your spouse, you still might want to file for a divorce. In such cases, it might be wise for you to know what to expect and do during this whole process. For example, hiring a divorce attorney or even a mediator (from Miam Direct, for instance) if you and your spouse cannot seem to agree with each other on decisions about your finances, kids, and property.
Addiction
If someone in the family is sick with drug addiction or alcoholism, the whole family deals with the consequences.
Recovery is a group effort. Counseling can help the addict understand his or her reasons for seeking solace in substances, and it can help the family understand how to avoid enabling these behaviors. You can also put the person suffering from addiction in a recovery program provided by a professional healthcare center. For instance, if you are situated in Thailand, you can search for Thailand rehabs and side-by-side get family therapy as well for improved communication in the family.
Violence
If there has been violence in the household, everyone in the family will need assistance in recovering. Domestic violence often recurs, despite promises to never do it again.
When violence is involved, you need professional help. Professional counselors can assess whether it is safe for family members to remain in the same house. They can also advise victims on how and when to communicate with abusive family members in order to stay safe.
Trauma
Maybe one of your family members has returned from military duty and suffers from PTSD. Maybe someone has been the victim of a crime or had an abusive childhood.
Trauma can manifest in many destructive ways within the family unit. Sometimes family members don’t even realize why a traumatized person is acting in an unusual way.
An experienced family therapist can help a family move through trauma towards healing and mutual support.
Mental Illness
No one knows whether mental illness is necessarily hereditary, but it does recur in families.
Whether one or more members of the family suffer from conditions like depression, borderline personality disorder, or bipolar disorder, everyone is affected.
A family therapist can help identify these conditions and provide ways to manage them. They can also help when someone with one of these illnesses starts to escalate and may require medical attention.
Family Therapy: We All Need Help Now and Then
Even if we love our families, they can often exacerbate our troubles. Family therapy is a valuable way to help people who care for each other go through challenging circumstances and maintain their familial bonds in a healthy, productive way.
For more information, contact us today.