Overcoming Toxic Family Relationships with Family Therapy
No family is perfect. Everyone has experienced tense and strained relationships with their immediate family members. And even if you generally feel that your connections with your parents and siblings are quite healthy, you can still hit roadblocks.
What should you do if your familial relationships start feeling toxic? Maybe you can’t seem to stop fighting, or perhaps you can’t bring yourself to compromise over a clash of values. Yet you want to salvage the relationship and maintain your connection.
If your other family members are open to the idea, attending sessions with a family therapist could be the solution. Here’s how family therapy can help you heal toxic relationships with your relatives.
Generational Analysis
Many people do not realize that the problems their family deals with today could be rooted in generations of trauma. Your grandparents or older generations may have struggled with the same issues.
A therapist can conduct a generational analysis of your family tree to identify the deeply rooted causes of the issues you’re dealing with today. Understanding that these problems didn’t start with you can help you work to break the cycle.
Exploring Individual and Collective Needs
Everyone in your family has their own individual needs that have to be fulfilled. But you also have collective needs that you have to meet as a family unit. What happens when those needs and wants clash? How can you learn to compromise and find a balance?
This can be a complicated dance. But your family therapist can help you determine the compromises that will work for you and explore the needs that have gone unfulfilled until now.
Set Healthy Boundaries
You may feel you need more time or space for yourself, away from your family. Or you might feel that your relatives have made inappropriate or unwarranted comments about your life choices.
Perhaps they tried to push you into lifestyle choices that weren’t right for you, or maybe they make demands of you that are unfair. In some boundaries, setting boundaries is not normalized, but this can easily lead to conflicts and frustrations that go on for years on end.
A family therapist can work with you and your family to set healthy, realistic boundaries.
Improved Communication Skills
Sometimes, when tensions are running high in your household, it can be difficult to get your point across. And if you live far away from certain family members, yet still speak with them regularly, you might find honest, in-depth conversations even more challenging.
Working through family problems can be tough when even talking about them can cause tempers to flare. With a family therapist, you can work together to improve your communication skills. The strategies you pick up in family therapy can enable you to navigate challenging, emotionally charged conversations and balance speaking with listening.
Conflict Resolution
Arguing happens occasionally in every family. But what if your family seems to fight more often than usual? While conflict is natural, and to a certain extent unavoidable, it’s important to learn conflict resolution methods, too.
When conflicts arise, you’ll be able to find solutions that are fair to each member of your family. You’ll also learn how to make space for everyone to share their perspective.
And in family therapy, you can even work on healing long-standing family conflicts that have caused divisions in your household for years. Healing does not happen overnight, but it is absolutely possible with time and support.
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Are you struggling with toxic family relationships? Working with a family therapist as a group can help. Reach out to us today to discuss your options for scheduling your first session.
