Couple and family therapy is a type of therapy used to help couples, whether married or not, change and develop their relationships, improve their communication, and resolve conflicts. Couple and family therapists work with individuals, couples, families with children, adult families, and groups.
All relationships experience difficulties from time to time. When issues such as relationship problems, marital conflict, divorce, remarriage, and parenting issues pile up or seem too complex to solve, it can be helpful to meet with a couple and family therapist.
A couple and family therapist can work with individuals or the entire family to help those involved in therapy take a different position. In addition, they can look at how different factors affect people within the system; they can help clients see their strengths, resilience, and available resources, and how they all contribute to the functioning of the system.
The frequency and amount of sessions vary from family to family, depending on their unique circumstances. Therapy may involve just a few sessions or may last several months or longer. The average session duration is 1.5 hours.
Couple and Family Therapy can help with topics such as:
- Communication difficulties
- Marital conflict
- Parent-child issues
- Work-family balance
- Family crisis periods
- Coping with medical illness
- Helping aging family members
- Sexual issues
- Separation and divorce requests
- Financial problems
- Infidelity issues
- Problems faced by remarried families, etc.
And when couples choose to end their relationship or divorce, guiding them through the difficult steps of separation with an eye toward minimizing conflict and maximizing mutual respect and understanding is also the work of couple and family therapy.