Does Your Family Struggle To Authentically Communicate With One Another?

Are you having trouble opening up to family members about personal topics? Has grief gotten the best of your family and you’ve become emotionally stagnant toward one another? Do interactions with your child or spouse leave you concerned about the state of their mental health?

Perhaps you’re adjusting to new family dynamics that involve step- or co-parenting, or raising a child alone due to divorce or separation. You may feel that others expect too much from you, and as a result, you’ve resolved to reset your boundaries. Maybe some of these issues have even spilled over into your marriage or partnership and have become the cause for recent arguments.

Communication—or a lack thereof—is often at the root of most family issues. With effective communication, you can address conflict in a healthy way so that you have a strong support base to speak with and address issues as they arise. Without healthy communication, however, you’re left with a pain and frustration that can leave you feeling misunderstood, unseen, and unloved.

Lack of communication can have serious implications for a family. If a child can’t relate fully to a family member, for example, they may cope with this lack of connection in a way that disrupts their mental health, behavior, or social skills. For an adult, this lack of connection may lead to increased conflict, perhaps causing an explosion that serves to release pent up emotions onto another person instead of calmly addressing the issue at-hand.

The challenges you and your family face may not disappear overnight, but therapy can give you the patience and courage to thoroughly address these issues. Ultimately, therapy can help your family develop more connectedness, set definite boundaries, better understand roles and responsibilities, and overall, grow stronger as a unit.

Every Family Has Their Problems

No family is perfect; every single one has issues. In fact, family struggles are so common that just as many of us can benefit from family therapy because this approach to therapy offers insight into our individual selves as well as how we relate to others.

There are many reasons why we may have trouble relating to family members. For instance, we may come from families where the tradition is to sweep issues under the rug, or give voice to some while silencing others along lines of age or gender. We may also judge ourselves when we experience problems we believe we shouldn’t experience—for example, when dealing with problems pertaining to our mental health or intimate relationships.

This lack of empathy with which we treat ourselves and loved ones can prevent us from overcoming our challenges. By being self-critical, we may unknowingly provide the fuel for our issues to worsen. Alternatively, we can’t overcome our issues if we don’t see them as issues—our struggles may seem normal to us because we’ve observed the same patterns of dysfunction since childhood. Additionally, we may also try to solve our problems by treating symptoms rather than the root cause. This approach never truly addresses a problem, and keeps us from finding solutions for the long-term.

Yet family therapy can help you find lasting solutions to your challenges. It offers you tools that can help your family to understand your history, name issues, and get to the root of problems so that you can eventually overcome them.

Family Therapy Can Help You Build A Solid Foundation Toward More Honest Communication

The frustrations that you feel within your family may be a sign that you are struggling to communicate with one another. And without this communication, you can lose the ability to address issues as they present themselves and eventually erode the foundations of your family unit.

Elevate Counseling can help you address these issues through a strength-based approach that focuses on what your family does well as individuals and as a collective. Our approach can help you establish a goal-based perspective and look at family issues more constructively. And therapy offers a safe space for you to be open and honest about your experiences, and cultivate the freedom to learn, practice, and model skills without judgment.

Elevate Counseling offers a sincere, reassuring, and candid environment where your family can begin to peel back and shed unhealthy layers so that you can rebuild your foundation to thrive. Our compassionate yet firm approach to counseling has helped many families work through toxic family relationship issues, substance abuse and addiction, child and teen-specific challenges, blended family issues, financial challenges, trauma, behavioral problems, sexuality, mental illness, grief, and divorce, among many others.

Treatment begins with an intake process, during which we will ask you to fill out paperwork to learn more about your family history and reason for seeking therapy. After reviewing the paperwork, we will share with you what you can expect from treatment as well as your right to privacy as a client. We will also identify your goals and develop a family treatment plan.

Sessions will then shift focus to the family systems therapy technique, which views the family as an emotional unit with each person as an integral part of the unit’s overall well-being. Over the course of treatment, we will speak with each family member to understand who they are and their unique individual perspectives about their experiences within and outside the family unit. We may also ask questions about the causes of family issues and how you have tried to manage them.

Through the course of therapy, we may also integrate evidence-based modalities to help build skills that strengthen the familial bond. These modalities include role play and specific techniques that build communication skills. These can serve as effective ways to place distance between yourself and a problem to view it more objectively. Role play allows you to step into the role and perspective of another family member to better understand their experiences and find the voice to communicate with them. This modality might require you to play a parent, sibling, yourself, or any other individual you may struggle to confront. In addition we may also introduce communication skills-building exercises such as those that focus on active listening, becoming more receptive to constructive communication, and mediated communication.

Elevate Counseling can help your family work through your issues to find ways to communicate from a real and authentic place. Family therapy offers the tools to effectively resolve conflict, develop problem-solving skills, and establish boundaries in healthy, life-affirming, and functional ways.

Perhaps you still have questions about family therapy…

My child probably won’t want to talk to anyone during sessions.

Getting a child to open up and participate in any type of therapy can be difficult—let alone a family setting where they are one of many and have less authority. One of the things that we do to meet children at their level is building rapport and learning more about who they are by asking questions, making affirmative comments, and engaging in play if needed. By meeting children, we’ve been able to get young family members who are resistant to open up more in therapy.

Not all of our family wants to participate in therapy.

While we believe families gain the most when everyone participates in therapy, we can still accomplish so much with all individuals who have taken the initiative to attend. If this is your case, not everyone needs to be present to affect change in the family unit. We will still maintain the family systems approach looking at how each person contributes to family dynamics, and use this knowledge to help you build strength and overcome challenges.

We have many high-conflict issues—I don’t know if therapy is the right place for us.

Our therapists have been able to help families with a wide variety of issues. In order to know if your situation might be beyond the scope of what we can handle, we would love to speak with you via a consultation call to learn more about your family’s specific needs for therapy. From here, we can determine if we are the right fit for you.

Are You Ready To Build The Communication Skills To Help Your Family Face Their Challenges And Heal?

Let us help you cultivate the inner tools so your family can stand on solid ground and bring their best, most open and authentic selves to your unit. If you’re ready to take the next step toward a healthier family bond, we invite you to contact us to schedule a free, 15-minute consultation.