Family Counselling
Families can become stuck in patterns that are difficult to see when you are living inside them.
An argument may appear to be between two people, but it seldom affects only those two people. A parent’s stress can change the atmosphere of the household. A child who is struggling may affect the relationship between the parents. Conflict between adults can draw children into roles they were never meant to carry.
This is why I approach family counselling by looking at the family as a system rather than assuming that one person is the problem.
Each person is an individual, but each is also responding to everyone else.
Looking at the Family as a System
Family systems theory helps us look beyond the immediate argument and ask what has developed between the people involved.
Over time, families develop roles and ways of relating that nobody necessarily chose consciously.
One person becomes the peacemaker. Another becomes the responsible one. Someone else withdraws when there is conflict. One child may be regarded as difficult while another becomes the child who never causes trouble.
These roles can become so familiar that the family stops noticing them.
There may also be alliances between some family members, distance between others, boundaries that are too rigid or not clear enough, or situations in which conflict between two people begins playing itself out through somebody else.
Looking at these patterns does not remove individual responsibility.
It simply helps us understand behaviour in context.
Moving Away From Blame
Families often arrive in counselling with a fairly clear idea of who they believe the problem is.
It may be the teenager who is angry, the parent who is controlling, the child who refuses to cooperate, the sibling who creates conflict or the family member who shuts down and will not communicate.
Sometimes those behaviours genuinely need to change.
But it can also be useful to ask what is happening around the behaviour.
A teenager’s anger may be occurring within a household where there is considerable tension. A parent who continually tries to keep the peace may unintentionally prevent difficult issues from ever being properly discussed. Adult brothers and sisters can find themselves falling straight back into childhood roles the moment the family is together.
Instead of asking only:
“What is wrong with you?”
we can begin asking:
“What happens between us that keeps bringing us back here?”
That question usually gives us more to work with.
An IFS-Informed Perspective
I also draw on an IFS-informed perspective in understanding some family dynamics.
People do not respond from one fixed emotional position all the time.
A person may have a part of them that becomes angry very quickly when they feel rejected. Another may withdraw because avoiding conflict once helped them feel safe. Someone who takes responsibility for everything may have learned that keeping control is the best way of preventing things from falling apart.
Beneath these reactions there can be fear, hurt, shame, vulnerability or simply a wish to be understood.
Understanding that does not mean excusing hurtful behaviour.
It does, however, allow us to become curious about what is driving the behaviour rather than responding only to what appears on the surface.
So instead of:
“Why are you always so angry?”
we might explore what happens just before the anger appears.
Instead of:
“Why do you never say anything?”
we can ask what makes saying nothing feel safer than speaking.
That change in the conversation can reduce blame while still allowing people to take responsibility for how they behave.
Roles, Boundaries and Relationships
Healthy families do not agree about everything.
Different personalities, values, needs and opinions are normal.
The important question is how a family manages those differences.
Family counselling can help people recognise recurring patterns, communicate more clearly and understand how their own behaviour affects other family members.
It may also involve looking at boundaries.
Some families become so involved in one another’s lives that it becomes difficult for individuals to make their own choices. In others, people become so disconnected that asking for support feels almost impossible.
The work is not about prescribing one correct family structure. It is about finding boundaries and ways of relating that work better for the people involved.
Families Change
Families are never static.
A way of parenting that worked when children were six and nine will probably need to change when they are sixteen and nineteen.
Children become adults. Adult children form relationships and families of their own. Parents age. Grandparents may begin requiring care. Divorce, remarriage and blended families can introduce completely new relationships and expectations.
Family counselling can be particularly useful during these periods of change.
This may include:
separation or divorce, blended families, adolescence, adult children leaving home, conflict between adult siblings, illness, grief, ageing parents, new caring responsibilities or difficulties adjusting to changing parent and adult-child relationships.
Sometimes the family does not need a major intervention. It needs help renegotiating roles that belonged to an earlier stage of family life.
Small Changes Can Affect the Whole Family
One of the useful things about thinking systemically is recognising that every family member does not necessarily have to change at exactly the same time for something different to happen.
If one person communicates differently, somebody else may no longer need to defend themselves in quite the same way.
Clearer boundaries can reduce resentment.
A parent responding differently to a teenager’s anger may change what happens next in the interaction.
When family members begin recognising the hurt or fear underneath certain behaviours, the conflict can become easier to understand.
That does not mean every problem disappears.
It means the family has more options than simply repeating the same interaction again.
What Family Counselling Is Trying to Do
I am not trying to create a family in which everybody agrees or never becomes angry with one another.
Nor do I want individual family members to lose themselves for the sake of keeping everybody else happy.
The work is to help people understand the family they are part of, become clearer about their own role within it and find better ways of managing the relationships that matter to them.
That can involve compassion, but it also involves accountability.
You can try to understand why somebody behaves as they do while still being clear about the effect their behaviour has on you.
I offer family counselling in Hout Bay, Cape Town, as well as online family counselling across South Africa