Family Therapy

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By Andrew Guthrie, Ph.D.

Family therapy can include a whole family or just those members of the family who require assistance with a specific problem or a chronic difficulty in relating to each other and living in relative harmony. Family therapy sessions are normally one session per week and should occur on a regular basis in order to be helpful.

I am a Toronto individual and family therapist who conducts child therapy (in Toronto), adolescent therapy (in Toronto), adult therapy (in Toronto) and family therapy (in Toronto). My theoretical orientation and training is psychodynamic or psychoanalytic, and this approach also influences how I view family therapy and work as a family therapist. In my family therapy sessions, the emphasis is on respectfully listening to each other talk about a problem as openly as possible in a safe and neutral environment. Problems in families are often rooted in communication problems, so during a session I may point out my observations about the way a family is communicating with each other. Since my orientation is psychoanalytic, which is essentially a historical and developmental therapy, some time in family therapy is spent exploring the collective past of the family as well as the individual pasts of its members. One of the assumptions in my work as a family therapist is that all behaviour has a reason that can be discovered through careful history-taking and exploration. Few people understand how the family we grew up in and our relationships with our significant others can influence who we choose as a partner, how we interact with that partner, and how we relate to our children. Understanding these patterns is essential to clarifying the present circumstance we find ourselves in and creating the possibility for a different future.  

 In other words, one assumption in psychodynamic therapy is that we may unconsciously repeat patterns from our pasts without knowing that we are doing so, including behaviours that are self defeating and hurtful to the people we love the most (Sigmund Freud called this the “repetition compulsion.”) My job as a family therapist in Toronto is to point out these patterns that may be hidden and unconscious, so to bring awareness to things that the members of a family were not previously aware of.

Family therapy can be especially useful with adolescents who are open enough to talk about their feelings in front of their parents, although many different configurations can be productive and useful. Please visit therapyintoronto.com for more information about my work and to contact me for a telephone consultation about the problem you are experiencing.