Family therapy seeks to resolve conflicts that develop within a family.
Family therapy is a treatment method that attempts to resolve conflicts or situations that a family group is going through. In this way, it serves for its members to express their feelings regarding that problem and try to reach an agreement, understanding each other and getting closer to the reality of the rest.
In order to present a comprehensible idea of the concept, therefore, it is necessary that we first define the two terms that make it up: therapy and family. Therapy is a treatment that tries to access the essence of something. In medicine , it is associated with methods that seek to alleviate or cure diseases . And the adjective family is received by all those concepts related to the family , the group of people linked by kinship .
There is a branch of psychotherapy that seeks to provide assistance to these families to improve their well-being and minimize conflict situations. It consists of establishing a communicative process between the psychotherapist and his patients, to achieve a change in attitude and behavior.
Goals of family therapy
Depending on the conflict that must be treated, the age of the family members and the degree of hostility that the therapist perceives in the patients, he or she must choose one technique or another to approach them. Your role should always be that of mediator; You should never put yourself in the place of any of the members, and you should maintain an objective view of the conflict, in order to help and not generate more complications in your patients' relationships.
If the conflict to be treated focuses on intimate relationships, we talk about marriage therapy or couples therapy ; In this case, the therapist must opt for a critical position of both positions and mark those attitudes that each of the people who make up the couple have and that are possible causes of coexistence problems or that significantly affect the relationship.
Family therapy seeks to turn destructive criticism into something constructive.
From destruction to construction
It is important to mention that one of the main objectives of family therapy is to convert the destructive criticism that manifests within the family environment into something constructive , which allows the group to reach a new stage. This type of treatment takes the family as a system with multiple interrelationships between its components. If one member presents a problem , its consequences affect the rest.
In those cases in which the hostility between two or more members is very acute, the therapist will advise that the patients be treated in separate sessions, as well as together, in order to delve into the individual conflicts that lead each to behave in a different way. a certain way versus the other. This means that family therapy sessions do not necessarily include all members of the group. The decision will depend on the professional and the needs of the family.
Family therapy and the genogram
It is worth mentioning that one of the most common techniques in family therapy is known as a genogram . This consists of developing a family diagram that allows up to three generations to be represented, so that its evaluation is more precise. Genograms include the structure of the family tree and the relationships that exist or have existed between different relatives. To do this, the therapist requires the collaboration of the patients, their openness, since it is the only way to achieve a result that allows them to work on the conflict that is being treated in therapy.
Finally, it is important to remember that this type of therapy is extremely efficient in solving all kinds of problems; Generally, individuals manifest difficulties in their relationship with the world because of having developed conflictive dynamics with their family members. If the therapist manages to get to the bottom of the matter, possibly that person will begin to live in a much healthier way and can solve their way of interacting with the environment , by analyzing their family ties.