Family & Relationships

Family and relationships counselling takes therapy out of the realm of individual will. In fact, more often than not, the purpose that a family or relationship member seeks through counselling can be understood as an expression of a conflict of wills – often unconsciously, often involving symptoms. Due to the nature of the collective, reaching and resolving a natural divergence in individual wills is a necessary process. You may require partner or family-oriented counselling to help you progress through the process of change when your family or relationship reaches a point of dilemma. Windsor Counselling and Psychotherapy Services can be helpful when one or more members of partnership have become stuck, using habitual or cyclical behaviours to meet new demands.

What Are the Goals of Family & Relationships Counselling?

The framework on which a family is built is communication. The Latin root of this word is from the verb communicare. It contains the word communis, which means ‘to share,’ and the word ‘care.’ Essentially family-oriented psychotherapy is the practice of giving thought, expressed through one’s individual language, to that which one is willing to take good care of.

“You see, we don’t know what our goals are. We learn our goals only in the process of getting there. “I don’t know what I’m building but I’m going to enjoy building it and when I get through building it I’ll know what it is.” In doing psychotherapy you impress this upon patients. You don’t know what a baby is going to become. Therefore, you take good care of it until it becomes what it will.”
~ Milton H. Erikson

Partners may communicate in paradoxical ways: I want you to take control more, but only in ways that I allow, or I want you to be more sensitive (to my needs), but in ways that require you to be less sensitive (to your needs). Children may develop creative ways to get their needs met when more traditional ways of communicating those needs fail. The family may need help as time nears for fledglings to leave the nest. Parents may need weaning from their children. Whichever the scenario, the family will be requiring new ways of thinking and communicating about aspects of living, reproducing, and dying that have hitherto not been supported.

How Can Therapy Help My Family?

People often come to Windsor Counselling & Psychotherapy Services for help in achieving specific outcomes such as:

• Bringing family members together after a crisis.
• Creating honesty and repairing trust between family members.
• Developing a caring and nurturing family environment.
• Helping family members to forgive and accept.
• Healthier boundaries and family dynamics.
• Awareness of interpersonal communication.
• Improved problem solving and resolving conflicts.
• Deeper empathy.
• Managing negative emotions and/or disruptive or harmful behaviours.

The only “expert” in the room about your life, your wants, your needs is you. But it is also true that sometimes we cannot see the wood for the trees. Talking with Patrick can help find creative ways to think about and resolve the challenges we all face via the demands of change.

“Its important for you to realize that your unconscious mind can start a train of thought and develop it without your conscious knowledge… and reach conclusions, and let your conscious mind become aware of those conclusions … and you can enjoy discovering so many things that are possible for you.”
~ Milton H. Erikson