Family Therapy
Family Therapy is a key part of Briony Barton’s service in Adelaide. She is a highly experienced family therapist and helps families from all ethnic, economic and religious backgrounds.
LGBTQ families and couples are welcome.
What can Family Therapy Help with?
- Communication issues that result in conflict within the family.
- Blended or step families in conflict.
- Dealing with loss or bereavement.
- Separation and divorce - minimise the impact on the family.
- Physical or mental health issues - how families can cope with changing circumstances and support each other.
- Addiction or dependence issues - e.g. problem drinking.
What is Family Therapy?
This specialized therapy helps understand and treat emotional problems and crises by working with the entire family, rather than just the individual. Therapy sessions focus on understanding thoughts, feelings, and behaviour within the family. The goal is to harness and strengthen family resources, and help family members to work collaboratively towards solutions to their problems.
You can learn skills to deepen family connections and get through stressful times, even after you’re finished going to therapy sessions.
This type of therapy is often short term. It may include all family members or just those able or willing to participate. Your specific treatment plan will depend on your family’s situation.
Note that children 12 years and under should be seen by a specialist in child psychology.
Family Therapy Aims To:
- Be inclusive and considerate of the needs of each family member and/or other key relationships (systems) in people's lives.
- Recognise and build on peoples' strengths and relational resources.
- Work in partnership with families, not on them.
- Be sensitive to diverse family forms and relationships, beliefs and cultures.
- Enable people to talk, together or individually, often about difficult or distressing issues in ways that respect their experiences, invite engagement and support recovery.
Sourced from: Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice UK.
Who Should Attend Family Therapy?
This type of therapy is often short term. It may include all family members or just those able or willing to participate. Your specific treatment plan will depend on your family’s situation.
Family therapy sessions can teach you skills to deepen family connections and get through stressful times, even after you’re done going to therapy sessions.
Note that children 12 years and under should be seen by a specialist in child psychology.Therapy helps by...
- Examining your family's ability to solve problems and express thoughts and emotions.
- Exploring family roles, rules and behaviour patterns to identify issues that contribute to conflict; and ways to work through these issues.
- Identifying your family's strengths, such as caring for one another.
- Identifying your family's weaknesses, such as difficulty confiding in one another.
Why Choose Briony for Family Therapy?
Briony trained at the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, the world renowned narrative therapy training and therapy centre over 30 years ago and has been practicing since. Established by one of the world’s foremost family therapist Michael White, narrative family therapy focuses on the myriad strengths that individual and families have that get lost and forgotten in a climate of problems.
Briony has also completed the family therapy course at Bower Place which takes a systemic view of families and their problems. It attempts to assist families by looking at all the people and organisations that are part of that family’s life.
Briony has three levels of training in the world renowned Gottman Couple Training, one of a small number of South Australians to do so. See here for a full list of Briony’s qualifications and training.