Family problems may arise due to many different reasons, such as conflicts among family members, communication problems, role-related issues, and situations like divorce. These problems can negatively affect the physical and psychological health of individuals within the family and can weaken family relationships.
Family therapy is designed to resolve problems and conflicts within a family. The therapist can examine family members’ speaking styles and communication patterns, address past traumas and losses, and encourage individuals within the family to identify their goals. Family therapy can be seen as a good option for resolving family problems and can help strengthen family relationships.
What Is a Family?
As an institution as old as human history and one that has maintained its continuity in the face of change, the family is the fundamental element for ensuring social cohesion and for building healthy social relationships with healthy individuals. The family is the place where a person—who comes into the world in a neutral state—is given an individual, social, and cultural identity from the moment they are born.
The family is a living system made up of parts that are connected to one another through both emotional and physical bonds and that influence one another. If we think of individuals as parts of the whole within this system, we can say that a problem experienced by one family member has qualities that affect both all family members and the functioning of the family.
The Family as a Psychological System
- The family has a common purpose; there is a shared purpose behind family members being together. The family’s purpose is independent of each member’s individual motives, intentions, and needs. This common purpose—determined at the point where all members overlap—creates a social, psychological, and physical environment in which the needs of all family members are valued and can be met simultaneously.
- The family has a structure; as in every social organization, the family also has a structure, and this structure enables the psychological functioning of the system.
- The family is a human system; formed by human members and consisting of interpersonal relationships and a physical environment, the family has a functioning grounded in psychological foundations.
- The family has an interactively competent structure; due to this structure, it can implement necessary changes within itself under certain conditions.
The functioning of the family as a psychological system reveals itself within the life cycle. The life cycle consists of stages that include various transition periods. Transition periods in the life cycle indicate certain fundamental changes in human structure. In this respect, we can say that the family’s functioning as a psychological system hosts important changes along with individuals’ life cycles. These changes experienced by individuals—and which are part of family functioning—also become part of the problems that arise within the family. As a whole made up of parts connected by organic bonds, the family experiences a cycle together with the individual life cycles, and family problems may occur.
What Are Family Problems?
In family relationships, various problems that negatively affect family functioning may occur, and this situation is referred to as family problems. Every family has a certain structure and an internal functioning. Each individual should exist within a family functioning that can meet basic needs such as being valued, feeling safe, a sense of closeness and solidarity, responsibility, learning to cope with problems, being in an environment of happiness and self-realization, and having a setting that supports the foundations of a healthy spiritual life. Family functioning should form a course based on the individual’s basic needs. When this course does not exist or when functioning is not established, family problems may arise.
We can list the factors that form the basis of family problems as follows:
- Internal maladjustment; the family is built on certain basic values, but these values should be reinterpreted over time according to new conditions. For internal harmony to be possible within the family’s fundamental structure, it must allow each individual to form their own identity, to develop their own values in line with shared values, and to realize themselves.
- External maladjustment; this is the situation in which the functioning of the family structure conflicts with social relationships, social statuses, and the functioning of the external world that forms outside the family. The family is based on establishing strong and healthy social bonds. In this respect, family problems do not function independently of maladjustments outside the family.
What Is Family Therapy?
Family therapy, unlike other approaches focused on the individual, addresses experienced problems within family functioning and as a psychological family system.
- Family therapy addresses existing family problems by including all family members. According to family therapy, all family members are involved in some way in both the continuation and resolution of family problems, and each member has important roles.
- Family therapy proceeds from the assumption that all family members are involved in some way in the problems; therefore, family members also have an important place in both the emergence of the problems and their resolution.
- In family therapy, problematic relationships are addressed through the relationships family members establish among themselves and with the outside world.
- The aim of family therapy is to identify and change problematic cycles within the family system.
- Family therapy is carried out as a form of support for individuals with ongoing distress, in order to regulate and examine family dynamics.
- The goal in family therapy is to establish the balance of living together by accepting individuals’ differences and their unique qualities.
- In family therapy, treatment is carried out not on individuals, but within the relationship networks to which individuals belong.
