Family Therapy

Family Therapy

Work with the household rather than with one person in it — because the problem is almost never sitting where everyone thinks it is.

Arrange a free 15-minute callCall 07395 854051
A family kitchen table after a meal, with plates, a homework folder and a phone face down.

  • Session length

    60 to 75 minutes

  • How it runs

    In person or online

  • Typical course

    Often 6–10 sessions

  • First step

    A free 15-minute call

Who this is for

Where people usually are when they get in touch

Families arrive at therapy holding a theory: it is the teenager, it is the drinking, it is what happened when the marriage ended. Systemic family therapy takes that theory seriously and then widens it, because behaviour that looks irrational in one person almost always makes sense as a response to something happening around them.

That is the core idea. Rather than treating one person as the identified patient and everybody else as the audience, family therapy works with patterns of interaction — who speaks for whom, which subjects are unspeakable, what happens in the ninety seconds after someone raises their voice, and which loyalties are being protected by the current arrangement.

This is not about apportioning blame among parents. It is nearly always a relief to families to discover that the question is not who caused this, but what everyone is doing to try to hold things together, and which of those efforts have stopped working.

Shoes and coats of different sizes by a family front door.

This is often the right service when

  • Your fifteen-year-old has retreated to their bedroom and every attempt to reach them makes it worse.
  • You and your ex-partner cannot get through a handover without it becoming a conversation about the marriage.
  • A step-parent is caught between being an authority figure and being a stranger, and nobody has agreed which.
  • Someone in the family has died and the house has organised itself around never mentioning them.
  • A diagnosis — of a child or a parent — has rearranged everyone's role and nobody chose their new one.
  • The same argument about phones, school or curfews happens nightly and everyone is exhausted by it.
  • Adult siblings are at war over the care of an ageing parent.
  • An adult child has stopped speaking to a parent and both would like to understand why before trying again.

Common ground

What people bring to this work

Not an exhaustive list, and you do not need a label to book a session. If what you are carrying is not named here, say so on the first call and we will tell you honestly whether this is the right place.

  • Conflict between parents and teenagers
  • School refusal, anxiety about attending, and behaviour at school
  • Co-parenting after separation or divorce
  • Step-parenting and blended-family roles
  • Bereavement and grief across the whole household
  • The impact of a child's diagnosis or additional needs
  • A parent's illness, disability or mental health difficulty
  • Sibling conflict and long-standing rivalry
  • Family estrangement and cut-off relationships
  • Adjusting to a new baby, a move or a change in circumstances
  • Cultural, generational and religious differences within a family
  • Adult children returning home, and negotiating a new arrangement

The approach

The models this work draws on

No single model fits everyone, and nothing here is applied from a manual. These are the established approaches the work draws on, described plainly so you can see what you are agreeing to.

Systemic family therapy

Systemic practice treats the family as an interconnected system rather than a group of individuals, and works with patterns of interaction rather than with a single identified patient. Its most recognisable technique is circular questioning — asking one family member what they think another feels, or what the youngest child would say if they dared. The purpose is not clever questioning for its own sake; it is to get several perspectives visible in the room at once, so that a fixed story can start to loosen.

Structural family therapy

Associated with Salvador Minuchin, structural work looks at how a family is organised: who is close to whom, where the boundaries between generations sit, and whether the adults are functioning as a coherent team. It notices when a child has been drawn into an adult role, or when one parent and one child have formed an alliance that leaves someone else outside. Sessions often use enactment — asking the family to have the difficult conversation in the room, so that it can be worked with directly rather than described.

Narrative therapy

Developed by Michael White and David Epston, narrative therapy works from the principle that the person is not the problem — the problem is the problem. In practice this means externalising: talking about the anger, or the worry, or the arguing as a separate thing that has moved into the household, rather than as a character flaw in a twelve-year-old. Families then look for the times they successfully resisted it, which are usually more numerous than anyone had noticed.

Solution-focused family work

Rather than mapping the problem in detail, this approach asks what a better week would actually look like, in specific and observable terms, and what small parts of it are already happening. Scaling questions give younger family members a way in that does not require them to be articulate about feelings. It suits families who are worn out by analysis and want something to do differently by Thursday.

Which of these gets used, and in what proportion, is decided with you rather than for you. You can ask at any point why a particular approach is being taken, and you should expect a straight answer.

What happens

From the first phone call to the last session

There are no surprises built into this process. Here is the whole sequence, in order.

  1. A first call with one adult

    One parent or carer usually makes the first contact. We use that call to understand the shape of the household, discuss who might usefully attend the first meeting, and agree how to invite the person everyone is most worried about without it feeling like an ambush.

  2. The first meeting

    Everyone who comes gets to describe the situation from where they sit, without being corrected. This often takes the whole session, and it is frequently the first time some family members have heard the others' version in full. We also agree confidentiality, including how information between parents and children will be handled.

  3. Mapping the family

    We usually draw a genogram — a family tree that records relationships, losses, moves, separations and patterns across generations. Families are often surprised by what it makes visible: a pattern of cut-offs, an anniversary nobody had connected, a role that has been passed down twice already.

  4. Working sessions, in different combinations

    Not everyone attends every session. Some meetings are with the parents alone to agree a consistent approach; some are with the siblings; some are with everyone. Between sessions there is often something concrete to try — a change to a routine, a different response to a familiar trigger, a conversation held at a different time of day.

  5. Spacing out and finishing

    Family sessions are often spread to fortnightly or monthly as things settle, because changes at home need time to bed in between appointments. We finish with an explicit review of what is different, what is still fragile, and what the family will do if the old pattern reappears.

An ordinary living room in afternoon light with signs that a family has just been sitting there.

A common worry

Nobody is going to be told they ruined their children

Parents frequently arrive braced for judgement, having already spent months privately auditing every decision they have made since the child was small. That is not what happens in the room, and it would not be useful if it did.

Families are shaped by things nobody chose: bereavements, illness, money, migration, the way each parent was themselves parented, and plain bad timing. The work is to understand how the current arrangement came about and what it is costing, not to establish fault. When blame is removed from the room, families are usually far more willing to change.

Children and young people are treated as people with a view, not as symptoms to be reported on. That includes being honest with them about what will and will not be passed on to their parents — an agreement we make openly, with everyone present, at the start.

Direction of travel

What people often work towards

These are the changes people commonly aim for in this work. They are not promises, and no honest practitioner can guarantee any of them — progress depends on what you bring, what is going on around you, and time.

  • Conversations at home that do not reliably end in someone leaving the room
  • Parents presenting a consistent line, even across two households
  • A young person who feels heard enough to stop communicating through refusal
  • Grief that can be spoken about at the table rather than managed privately by everyone
  • Clearer boundaries in a step-family, agreed by the adults rather than improvised nightly
  • Handovers and contact arrangements that stop being a battleground
  • A shared account of what happened, which the family can live with going forward
A family of mixed ages walking a footpath on a bright cold day, seen from behind.

Being straight with you

Family therapy is not mediation and it is not a legal process: we do not make findings, produce reports for court, or determine contact arrangements. It also cannot proceed where a child or adult is at risk of harm without acting on that — safeguarding duties override confidentiality, and this is explained to every family before the first session. Where there is domestic abuse in a household, joint sessions may not be safe, and we would talk with you about a different route.

See urgent help and 24-hour support lines

Questions

Family Therapy: the questions people ask first

The things people most often want to know before booking. If yours is not here, ask it on the free call — no question is too small or too awkward.

Does the whole family have to come?

No. Family therapy works with whoever is willing to be in the room, and useful change frequently starts with two people rather than six. It is often most productive to begin with the adults, agree a consistent approach, and invite the young people in once the atmosphere at home has shifted slightly. We would discuss the best combination on the first call.

My teenager point-blank refuses to attend.

That is extremely common and it is not a reason to give up on the idea. Refusal is usually a reasonable response to the belief that they are being taken somewhere to be fixed in front of their parents. Work can start with the parents alone; when the young person hears that the sessions are about the household rather than about them, many change their mind. Some never attend, and the work still helps — the pattern at home changes when the adults' part in it changes.

Will my child be blamed, or told they are the problem?

No. The premise of systemic work is the opposite: behaviour is understood as a response to a context, not as a defect in one person. Young people are spoken to directly, at a level appropriate to their age, and asked for their view of what is happening rather than presented with the adults' conclusions.

Is this the same as mediation?

It is not. Mediation is a structured negotiation aimed at reaching a specific agreement, most often about property, finances or contact arrangements, and it sits alongside the legal process. Family therapy is about relationships and patterns — how you talk to each other, what has gone unsaid, how the family works — and it produces no agreement or document. Some separating families use both, at different stages, for different purposes.

What will you tell me about what my child says?

We agree that openly, with everyone present, before any separate conversation happens. Young people generally speak more freely when they know the rules, and parents generally cooperate better when the rules are explicit. The one boundary that is not negotiable is safeguarding: if a child or vulnerable adult appears to be at risk of significant harm, that has to be acted on, and everybody is told that at the outset.

Can separated parents attend without being in the room together?

Sometimes, and it depends on the situation. Where two parents genuinely cannot be in a room together, there are ways to structure the work — separate sessions, careful sequencing, or focusing on the parent-child relationships individually. What we would not do is carry messages between two households or take on a role that belongs to a mediator or a solicitor. We would be honest on the first call about whether what you need is something this service can offer.

More general questions — about confidentiality, records, insurance and how appointments are booked — are answered on the frequently asked questions page.

Related

If this is not quite the right fit

People often start in one service and move to another, or do two in sequence. Nothing about that is unusual.

Couples & Relationship Therapy

Two people, one room, and enough structure that the conversation you keep failing to have can finally happen without it turning into the same argument.

Read about couples therapy

Individual Therapy & Counselling

A confidential hour that belongs entirely to you — to think out loud, to make sense of what is happening, and to work out what you want to do about it.

Read about individual therapy

See all four services compared

Getting started

Start with a conversation, not a commitment

Fifteen minutes on the phone is usually enough to work out whether family therapy is the right place to begin. There is no charge for it and nothing to sign afterwards.

Book a first sessionCall 07395 854051

Enquiries are answered within one working day. This is a planned-appointment service and not a crisis line — if you need help now, please use the urgent help page.

A lit hallway with a door open to a warm kitchen beyond on a dark evening.