Family Counseling

When one person struggles with a mental, emotional, or behavioral problem, it affects the entire family, causing conflicts, disrupting relationships, and promoting daily trauma. You can overcome these struggles with family counseling. The team at Northern Virginia Psychiatric Group can help families learn to manage their challenges, rebuild healthy communication, and restore their loving families. If your family needs help, call the office in Fairfax, Virginia, or book an appointment online today.

What is family counseling?

Family counseling focuses on the mental health challenges affecting the entire family unit. A family unit includes everyone in the same household, whether or not they're related. In some cases, family counseling may include people who have a significant role in your family's life, even if they live in a different house.

During family counseling, your therapist identifies the family's specific challenges and focuses on helping each person understand if they have a positive or negative influence on the problem.

Then everyone learns how to work together to solve the problem, support one another, and strengthen or rebuild their family.

When would I need family counseling?

Family counseling can help with nearly any problem you and your family members face. The team at Northern Virginia Psychiatric Group often works with families who have:

• Behavioral problems
• Trouble at school
• Children with disabilities
• Communication problems
• Parent-child conflict
• Sibling conflict
• Domestic violence
• Death of a loved one
• Divorce or separation
• Traumatic experiences
• Major life transitions (e.g., moving, the birth of a new baby)
• One or more family members with a mental health disorder

When one person has a psychological, developmental, or academic problem, their struggles create stress that isolates the family from one another and their friends.

What should I expect during family counseling?

Family counseling is based on your unique family dynamics. The way each person communicates with the others and each individual's ability (or inability) to take responsibility and deal with the problem can build or destroy the family unit.

The family therapists at Northern Virginia Psychiatric Group have experience using many psychotherapy techniques. When working with families, they may use a therapy like cognitive-behavioral therapy, or they may take other family-based approaches.

For example, one type of family therapy focuses on nonverbal communication and the impact of behaviors on the family. Or your therapist may have you fill out worksheets between sessions and use that information to guide the next family session.

No matter what type of therapy they use, they focus on building understanding, communication, and collaboration between all family members.

If fights, emotional outbursts, and lack of communication affect your family, call Northern Virginia Psychiatric Group or book an appointment online today.