Family and Marriage Therapy

Family Therapy

Family Therapy is a type of psychotherapy that improves factors impacting the family dynamics. Session goals may include facilitating communication, building relationships, and resolving conflicts. Family therapy could involve any member of the family, including your spouse, children, parents, or extended family.

During a session, your psychologist will equip family members skills such as with perspective-taking, problem-solving, and communication skills to deepen family bonds and better understand each other. More importantly, effective Family Therapy helps families find a way to develop and maintain a healthy and functional family unit.

Family therapy could also support families through difficult periods or major transitions within the family. Common reasons for family therapy session may include parent-child challenges, unforeseeable changes such as death or unemployment, divorce, substance abuse, addiction or even mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

Ultimately, the goal of family therapy is to support the family in navigating through issues that may be causing conflict or disharmony in the family.

Marriage Therapy

The Gottman Method Couples Therapy is a scientific approach based on decades of research and hundreds of empirical studies involving over 3,000 couples.

Interventions used are grounded in the concept of the Sound Relationship House, with foundational elements of a healthy relationship including:

Ψ Build Love Maps
Ψ Share Fondness and Admiration
Ψ Turn Towards Instead of Away
Ψ The Positive Perspective
Ψ Manage Conflict
Ψ Make Life Dreams Come True
Ψ Create Shared Meaning
Ψ Trust
Ψ Commitment

The Gottman approach includes a thorough assessment of the couple’s relationship and integrates research-based interventions. The goal is not just to manage conflicts, which often is the primary reason why most couples start Couples Therapy, but to work towards building an enjoyable long-term relationship.

Find out more about the Gottman Method at the Gottman Institute.

Our Family and Couple Therapists

What to Expect from Couples Therapy?

  1. Together, the couple will undergo an Assessment Phase, including sessions together as a couple as well as individually, will facilitate exploration of the couple’s strengths and challenges in the relationship. At times, assessing the suitability for couple therapy would also be necessary.

  2. The couple will also individually complete the online Gottman Relationship Checkup.

  3. After completing the Gottman Relationship Checkup, each partner will attend a 60 minutes individual session to provide each person’s personal history.

  4. The couple will attend a 90 minutes feedback session where evidence based research on what makes relationships successful, how the information relates to the couple’s current state of relationship, and tools and strategies that would address challenges in the relationship would be shared. At the end of the session, an appropriate Action Plan will be collaboratively developed.

  5. The Action Plan could include:

    1. Couple therapy at regular intervals. Online or face-to-face sessions depending on the results of the assessment.

    2. Intensive / Marathon couple therapy, which is an approach to address specific issues over 2 full days. May be online or face-to-face depending on the results of the assessment.

    3. Not proceeding with couple therapy; e.g. if there is a third party in the relationship. Discernment counselling may be recommended instead.

Outcomes

Our family and couple therapists employ different techniques and exercises from cognitive, behavioral, or other types of individual therapy. The benefits of family therapy include:

Ψ Build and respect healthy boundaries

Ψ Improve communication

Ψ Learn problem-solving skills

Ψ Develop understanding and empathy

Ψ Reduce conflict

You may find that your family unit comes out stronger and more cohesive after therapy. Moreover, family therapy can help improve mutual trust and honesty between its members. This creates a supportive environment with fewer sources of tension and stress.

Common Concerns


All participating members must be willing to rebuild and strengthen the relationship for therapy to be effective. Our clinicians utilises the Gottman Method.

Find out more about the different types of therapies here.