How do Family Counseling Techniques Work? Top Methods to Give it a Try!

Whether you are an adult, teenager, or just a child, a family is what gets you started in the first place. It’s where your life story begins. Many children are fortunate enough to fall back on a stable environment, but not everyone can say the same that the people who surround you right from the day you are born are the ones who influence you the most.

So, the best way to understand someone is to understand and analyze their childhood first.  Today, family counseling or family therapy forms the crux of mental therapy and helps maintain a healthy equilibrium in individuals. Today, we will discuss key family therapy counseling techniques that help you stay as a family unit and resolve the basic differences that are keeping you apart.

Milan Therapy

How do your belief systems work? As a collective system or as a whole? This therapy challenges conventional family rituals and practices that give rise to conflicts. When you focus on these family rituals which are in your subconscious level with the help of belief systems. Milan therapy helps to dismantle these age-old beliefs and thought processes that give rise to conflicts in the familial structure.

Strategic Therapy

Strategic therapy is all about observing the interactions between each family member, whether they are in conflict or otherwise, and helps bring awareness to the table in a more observant and mindful way. So, the best way to approach this is to assign each and every family member some kind of task. This helps observe how the members react to certain challenges and how they reach the goals while they each grapple with their individualistic problems, such as mental or individualistic illnesses or disorders. This type of therapy also helps find out all about the most dominant family member and start including communication changes that have a positive impact on each and every member, even the one who is facing issues.

Narrative Therapy

Narrative therapy is another family counseling technique that brings personal narratives into the foray. You recognize and embrace individualistic qualities and skills. This helps the members get a fresher perspective of their problems and conquer their problems putting their skills to good use. Narrative therapy is a pretty unique therapy that helps patients break free from the inner demons or the negative influences that are affecting their quality of life. You recognize your value, capability, and ability better. It helps you get over the habit of continually undermining yourself.

Structural Therapy

Structural family therapy is all about understanding the power dynamics within the family unit and evaluate each and every role that a family plays within the structure of a family unit. So, each family member plays a significant role within the space of a family unit. The intricacies of family hierarchies are examined and analyzed, and the ‘power structure’ of each and every family member is checked out and evenly distributed. Structural therapy is the family counseling technique that caters to each and every need of the individual and helps reestablish the respect that each and every family member for each other.

Transgenerational Therapy

Transgenerational therapy evaluates the intergenerational relationships and conflicts that bother each and every family unit and focuses on the problematic aspects of the belief systems that shift from one generation and the next. This method is greatly successful when the family is a large family and includes two generations of a family living under the same roof, read the parents, grandparents and children are staying all together in one home. This technique is used in tandem with Milan therapy to reap off maximum benefits.
Family therapy is not something that may include long sessions, in fact, it may include just five to twenty sessions. Family therapists mostly oscillate between these specific therapy techniques, using what works for each one of the families in question. As each of the family dynamics differs from one to the other and the therapy needs also change accordingly. The ultimate goal of family counseling is to bring the balance back in the family and make it a more harmonious unit helping to strengthen family ties and building a healthy relationship not just now, but in the years to come. Before career pressure, financial issues, communication issues get to you, try family counseling to bring a positive change in not just you but in the entire family.