Family psychotherapy

Family psychotherapy treats the family as the unit of work rather than the individual. That is the whole of the difference, and it changes a great deal.

Families arrive with a designated person: the child who is failing at school, the son who will not speak to anyone, the daughter-in-law everything is apparently about. Family work does not begin by accepting that framing. It looks instead at the arrangement everyone is part of — who speaks for whom, which subjects the household has agreed not to raise, what happens each time someone tries, and what the difficulty is doing for the family as well as to it. Very often the person who was brought in is carrying something on behalf of people who are not talking about it.

Sessions are structured and they are not a free-for-all. Your psychologist sets out how the room will be used, makes room for the people who get least of it, and interrupts the loop the family can already do from memory. Some sessions are held with everyone, some with a part of the family, some with one person; you are told which and why.

In Pakistani households the family is often larger than the people who live in the house, and the pressures come from further out — in-laws, grandparents, a brother abroad whose opinion arrives by phone. That is treated as part of the picture rather than as a complication.

What it is not: it is not a tribunal, it is not a way of getting a psychologist to tell a relative they are wrong, and it is not a service that will deliver a particular family arrangement. Whether family work is what is indicated for your situation is a clinical decision made after an initial session, not a choice you have to make from a website.

PHC is an assessment-first practice. No family begins this work here because somebody asked for it by name — they begin it because an initial session found it was what the situation called for.

1. An initial session.We ask what has been going on, for how long, and what it is costing the household. Where the picture needs more than a conversation, emotional assessment and symptom screening decides which further tests, if any, are clinically warranted — and where a child is at the centre of the concern, learning and achievement assessment may be the more useful route.
2. A psychologist matched to what that found.Psychologists at PHC are not assigned on availability. Assignment is based on speciality, your presenting needs and clinical fit. Preferred psychologist gender is one of the six details we ask for when you book, and for family work it is worth deciding it as a household. If the fit is not right, tell us and we will move you to someone else.
3. 50-minute sessions, in clinic or online.A standard session is 50 minutes. Who attends which session is a clinical decision your psychologist makes with you rather than a standing rule. If a session runs beyond 50 minutes and your psychologist has the time, you can extend by an hour at an extra fee — you are told what that is before it happens. Minor overruns of one to five minutes are not charged.
4. Reviewed as it goes.What you are working on is revisited rather than assumed, and so is who should be in the room. Where the difficulty turns out to sit between two partners rather than across the household, marriage and couples counselling may be the better unit of work. Where a young child is the person struggling, play therapy may be used alongside, with the parents closely involved.

At PHC, family work is used with households at any stage: a family in transition, conflict between generations, in-law pressure, a child whose difficulty the rest of the family is organised around, or an illness or addiction that the whole household is managing.

Not everybody has to attend for it to be useful. Families in which one member refuses outright are common, and the work proceeds with the people who will come — while being honest that an absent person is not being treated and that a description of them is not an assessment of them.

It is not the right service for everything. Where someone in the household is being harmed, joint sessions are not the appropriate setting and PHC will say so rather than proceed. Where screening points to something in one family member that needs individual work or psychiatric input first, you will be told that plainly.

Each of these has a page of its own explaining what PHC does about it. Family psychotherapy is named on all six as a route that may be indicated — which one applies to you is decided at the initial session.

• Family difficulties
• Parenting difficulties
• Marital conflict
• Addiction
• Bipolar disorder
• Stealing in children and teenagers

No psychologist's supplied profile names family psychotherapy as a modality they practise, so this page does not print a name. That is deliberate. Every clinician card on this site is drawn from what that clinician wrote about themselves, and we will not manufacture one.

What is true of the whole team: every psychologist at PHC holds a minimum postgraduate qualification in clinical psychology and completed over 800 supervised clinical hours before joining. Who you would see is decided at the initial session, matched on speciality, presenting needs and clinical fit — and several of our psychologists do name family and relationship concerns among the areas they work with, which you can read on their own profiles.

See every psychologist at PHC.