Family therapy

Family therapy is a talking therapy that helps people in close relationships to better understand and support each other.

Sometimes families can be facing enormous challenges. CancerCare clients may be facing cancer/life shortening illnesses, or bereavement and grief. These issues can feel overwhelming; family therapy draws on the family's strengths and helps families to get through these difficulties.

How can Family Therapy be helpful?

The aim of family therapy is to help family members express and explore difficult thoughts and feelings safely, understand each other’s experiences and values, appreciate each other's needs, build on family strengths and work together to make useful changes in their relationships and lives.

When families struggle with challenging situations, be it grief, anxiety, or illness it can sometimes lead to problems at home. The atmosphere at home and the way problems are tackled can be stressful and painful for family members.

Family therapy can help, in a non-blaming way, to provide an understanding of complex family systems and how they can adapt and change. It can also provide a safe space to explore unhelpful patterns of interactions that may have developed, despite everyone’s best intentions.

What happens in Family Therapy?

Family therapists are trained to work with children, young people, adults, carers and other professionals.

Their aim is not to take sides, blame or provide simple answers. Instead, they aim to engage family members in sharing their understanding of what is going on and exploring ways forward that work for everyone.

Your therapist may help by:

• Encouraging the sharing of feelings, and making space for listening to others
• Respecting each other’s beliefs, values, assumptions and needs
• Sharing challenges, fears, and hopes
• Highlighting unhelpful family patterns and dynamics
• Exploring your family's strengths and finding new ways to thrive

Who can come?

Family can mean many things to different people. CancerCare considers family therapy to include parents and children of any age, spouses, partners, stepparents, adoptive parents, foster/kinship carers, grandparents, siblings, co-parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. If you aren’t sure if it fits your family, then please give us a ring to discuss.

Session information

We offer up to eight family therapy sessions, which are 80 minutes long. At the beginning you would meet with the family therapist weekly and then agree together how often the sessions would occur. Sometimes families need time in between sessions to process and practise what they have learned.

Sometimes the session will involve the whole family and other times it will be a combination of family members. Your family therapist will discuss this with you.

Next steps

Unfortunately, we are currently only able to provide Family Therapy from our Slynedales centre.

If family therapy isn’t for you right now, you may be able to access Parent and Guardian sessions or one-to-one counselling for adults and children and young people.

At your initial assessment meeting, the assessor will talk to you about the different therapeutic options.