Family Counseling: Definition, Benefits, & Theories
Family counseling aims to address mental health issues experienced by one or more family members and improve mental health by changing how the family operates.
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Early in my training as a therapist, I was assigned to work with a supervisor who specialized in family counseling. He was one of the most upbeat, flexible, and gentle people I had ever met—a true delight to learn from. The more I learned about family counseling, the more I realized that his interpersonal style was central to his effectiveness as a family counselor. Unlike many family counselors who work in schools, he worked in private practice, meaning families came to him of their own accord for help. |
This training experience taught me that family counseling was too complex and challenging for me, but I retain a deep respect for anybody who steps into the roiling waters of family counseling. Let’s look at what family counseling involves and how it helps families heal.
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What Is Family Counseling? (A Definition)
Second, family counseling sees the family as a system within, or interacting with, other systems. Families typically live in a neighborhood within a town or city; they have relationships with neighbors, teachers at school, coworkers, fellow churchgoers, or the local police, among many other possibilities. Each of the systems these people represent—a faith community, a school, a workplace—influences the family system. For example, the disciplinary actions taken by a school, or the expectations for proper conduct promoted in the family’s church, might cause conflict within the family. Perhaps a parent’s long work hours fray their connections with their children, or neighbors complain about how the family’s children play outside.
Family counseling, therefore, is therapy that aims to treat individual- and family-level issues at the level of the family system and where that family system interacts with other systems (Smith et al., 1995). Accordingly, it uses counseling methods that focus on the individual or the family, as well as trying to intervene in the systems that influence the family.
Benefits of Family Counseling
The importance of this kind of intervention cannot be overstated, as family dysfunction is at the root of many subsequent individual mental health issues, such as eating disorders, anxiety and depression, and later substance abuse (Carr, 2014). For example, parents who closely supervise and critique their children’s eating habits may be motivated by a desire to raise healthy children, but they may also be causing their children to develop behaviors associated with eating disorders.
Family counseling is also often delivered in school settings, such as through school counselors or guidance counselors. Family counseling provided this way can help with family communication and lead to greater satisfaction with overall family life (Kelchner et al., 2020). In research with families that have gone to family counseling, the family members make it clear that family counseling helps by identifying strengths of the family and individual members, highlighting the ways that family members’ actions are logical attempts to get their needs met, and showing unconditional positive regard for all family members, regardless of their behaviors (Sackett & Cook, 2022).
Examples of Family Counseling
I worked briefly in a family counseling role with one client and her parents. My client was a nine-year-old girl with some learning challenges and a fair bit of anxiety. Her family system made dealing with those learning challenges and anxiety far worse: Her parents fought constantly about the right way to structure her day, get homework done, and provide discipline. Although they claimed to have her best interests at heart, they were much more invested in proving each other wrong than listening to their daughter.
Our family counseling approach was to give each family member a chance to articulate what was important to them and what they were trying to achieve. The parents had to learn to honor their daughter’s need for independence and her need to learn from her own mistakes; they also had to learn how to balance their need to feel in control with their desire to have an optimally functioning daughter. It was hard going, with lots of strong emotions and accusations flying back and forth. It taught me the power of family counseling and gave me a humbling lesson in what my strengths are and aren’t as a therapist.
If you are curious what family counseling looks like in action, I recommend watching the video below. Although it is a role-play, with actors rather than an actual family, it captures the essence of how a family counseling session would play out.
Video: Family Counseling Role-Play
Family Counseling vs. Therapy
Family counseling and family therapy are almost interchangeable terms—they mean pretty much the same intervention (Goldenberg et al., 2017). That said, some people use the term family counseling, in distinction from family therapy, to emphasize that the intervention is not limited to traditional talk therapy but can also include the kind of systems-level interventions often employed by, for example, clinical social workers. Also, you may find that people educated as counselors will refer to themselves as family counselors, while people educated as therapists will call themselves family therapists. Most of the time, their training has been much the same and they are offering pretty much the same services.
Family Counseling Activities
A similar, but more focused, activity is the family floor plan. In this activity, the parents in the family might draw maps of their childhood homes. Just as a genogram starts to reveal connections between people across generations, the family floor plan can point to important ways that parents learned how families work when they were growing up. Did family members get lots of physical space from each other, or was everybody up in each other’s business? The answers might explain some of how the family in therapy operates today.
Family Counseling Theories
Another implication of this theoretical approach is that no behavior happens in isolation (Sprenkle et al., 2013), even those we would generally think of as so positive that they shouldn’t have consequences. For example, if a husband goes off to inpatient treatment for his alcoholism then returns home sober and stays that way, shouldn’t that just be an all-around win? Yes, in theory, but not if his wife derived a lot of purpose in life from trying to keep him sober and his children were accustomed to minimal supervision because mom and dad were focused on dad’s drinking. Family counselors know that even positive changes shift the whole system around.
Family Counseling Methods
Let’s look briefly at what family counseling methods look like for school-based family counseling (Soriano et al., 2013). In this setting, in addition to working from a systems focus, a family counselor tries to build a partnership with the child’s parents, thinks about ways to advocate for the child in the other systems they exist in, and even tries to change how the school functions to better serve the child.
Family Counseling for Divorce
This kind of counseling, which borders on couple’s therapy, nonetheless keeps the good of the other family members in mind, and it has been shown to help parents do a better job coparenting after the divorce is finalized (Emerson et al., 2021). This may be because the family counselor has helped the parents find a solution in which they can recognize that their mutual interests are served.
For families that are already divorced, family counseling can also help children make sense of what has happened in their family, ultimately avoiding situations where children blame themselves or end up estranged from one parent (Chen et al., 2021). It is unrealistic to expect families of divorce to have minimal to no conflict; instead, the goal of family counseling is to help divorced parents find an effective amount of connection with each other while minimizing the extent to which they draw their children into their conflicts with each other (Lebow & Newcomb Rekart, 2007).
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Final Thoughts on Family Counseling
As I said at the outset, being a family counselor is not for the faint of heart. Neither is going to family counseling as a client! Family counseling works best when each family member involved knows they are being heard and valued—at least by the therapist to start, and eventually by all their family members too. This takes a highly skilled and patient family counselor, like the psychologist I introduced you to at the start of this article.
If you are considering seeking family counseling, I recommend thinking carefully about whom you want to involve in it and how you want to invite them to come. What can each person gain from coming to therapy? Don’t worry if what they probably want conflicts with what you want in some way—it’s the job of the family counselor to help you both understand each other and find a mutually satisfying solution. Have patience with the process, but also know that if the family counselor cannot keep your family relatively calm and regulated during sessions, or has a hard time connecting with each family member, you might be better off with a different counselor.
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References
- Carr, A. (2014). The evidence base for family therapy and systemic interventions for child-focused problems. Journal of Family Therapy, 36(2), 107–157.
- Chen, S. Y., Roller, K., & Kottman, T. (2021). Adlerian family play therapy: Healing the attachment trauma of divorce. International Journal of Play Therapy, 30(1), 28–39.
- Doherty, W. J., & Harris, S. M. (2017). Helping couples on the brink of divorce: Discernment counseling for troubled relationships. American Psychological Association.
- Emerson, A. J., Harris, S. M., & Ahmed, F. A. (2021). The impact of discernment counseling on individuals who decide to divorce: Experiences of post‐divorce communication and coparenting. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 47(1), 36–51.
- Goldenberg, I., Stanton, M. & Goldenberg, H. (2017). Family therapy: An overview. Cengage Learning.
- Kelchner, V. P., Campbell, L. O., Howard, C. C., Bensinger, J., & Lambie, G. W. (2020). The influence of school-based family counseling on elementary students and their families. The Family Journal, 28(3), 273–282.
- Lebow, J., & Newcomb Rekart, K. (2007). Integrative family therapy for high‐conflict divorce with disputes over child custody and visitation. Family Process, 46(1), 79–91.
- Sackett, C. R., & Cook, R. M. (2022). A phenomenological exploration of client meaningful experiences in family counseling. Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation, 13(2), 116–133.
- Smith, R. L., Carlson, J., Stevens‐Smith, P., & Dennison, M. (1995). Marriage and family counseling. Journal of Counseling & Development, 74(2), 154–157.
- Soriano, M., Gerrard, B., & Adler, A. (2013). School-based family counseling: An overview. In B. Gerrard & M. Soriano (Eds.), School-based family counseling: Transforming family-school relationships (pp. 2–15). Institute for School-Based Family Counseling.
- Sprenkle, D. H., Davis, S. D., & Lebow, J. L. (2013). Common factors in couple and family therapy: The overlooked foundation for effective practice. Guilford Press.
- Smith, R. L., Stevens-Smith, P., & Gladding, S. T. (1992). Family Counseling and Therapy: Major Issues and Topics. ERIC Counseling and Personnel Services Clearinghouse, University of Michigan.
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