If someone in your family is struggling and it impacts the family, you may want to pursue family counseling in Little Elm, Texas. If you just don’t feel like your family is connecting well, family counseling at Little Elm Christian Counseling can help you uncover why and find the solution.
Get connected with a Christian Counselor
Please contact our reception team at
(469) 333-6163
In family counseling, one or more family members are able to learn healthy behavioral patterns and communicate better so that the entire family unit operates in a way that keeps the family connected, feeling seen and heard, and able to enjoy each other’s company. While no family is perfect, counseling can help the entire family grow in resilience in the midst of transitional seasons, traumatic events, developmental changes, and work/life balance issues.
A trained family counselor at Little Elm Christian Counseling will help you and your family identify ways that your family can better connect through small changes in thought patterns, communication styles, and at times, diagnoses that benefit from medication and/or individual therapy. Family members meet with a trained and certified counselor so that they can strengthen their emotional, behavioral and mental wellness — which benefits the entire family long after counseling sessions are complete.
Counseling sessions usually last around 50 minutes, and it’s important that you and/or your family members (whoever is willing to attend the sessions) are comfortable with the counselor. It may mean trying a few different counselors before the family finds one with whom each person is comfortable sharing.
Typically, the first few sessions are spent getting to know the family member(s). Occasionally, this session starts with just one or two family members (such as a parent or set of parents) and then may involve other family members — children, for example — when the counselor is ready to have their input. Ongoing sessions may vary between individual and family sessions, depending on the needs of your particular family.
Often, family counseling is short term and deals with specific life difficulties or relational struggles. Once family members have been able to learn healthier communication patterns and/or have experienced tools to help build relational bridges, the counseling sessions may dissipate. Your counselor may be open to being seen on an as-needed basis at that point. The amount of visits depends on the specific needs of each family, but around 12 sessions is usually a reasonable expectation.
While individual counseling typically focuses on highlighting patterns that need to change in just one person, family counseling looks at patterns from the perspective of how they impact the relationships among all the members of a family unit.
There are several variations of family counseling, including:
Structural: This is where a counselor helps to unpack the structure of a family and how it interacts in sub-relationships, boundaries, and levels of hierarchy. Once he/she has had time to understand this structure, the counselor can help the family understand what patterns are negatively impactful and help the family learn tools for wellness.
Systemic: A counselor who specializes in systemic counseling looks at the beliefs and socio-cultural influences that exist within the family. These inform how a counselor can then help the family identify problems and patterns, beliefs and how those are explained, emotional or attachment difficulties, and factors that are contextual according to that specific family unit — not at an individual level.
Strategic: This type of counseling looks at relationships among the various family members to identify areas of struggle or concern, pinpoint specific goals and solutions, and strategies for how to reach the new goals and how to handle — in a healthy way — specific patterns that may arise even in the future.
Narrative: A counselor who specializes in this kind of family counseling sees everything within the context of story. Each individual in the family unit has a story that unfolds differently from his or her perspective, and that story impacts the others in the family and vice versa. The counselor’s role is to help family members view the narrative they’ve associated with from a wider, more objective lens. This helps separate the person from the problem and empowers family members to rewrite their narrative.
Transgenerational: This type of counseling explores the issues at hand through the lens of generational differences. It is helpful for the counselor to learn about the generational history of the family so that he or she can then help the family members identify why there are specific communication breakdowns or difficulties seeing eye to eye.
Communication: While communication is important in all types of family counseling, this specifically deals with identifying how a problem can be associated with the communication barriers, inconsistencies, and harmful patterns within a family unit. So communication counseling really allows the family to learn ways of interacting with each other so that problems are solved in healthy ways.
Psychoeducation: This kind of family counseling allows the entire family unit to better understand a specific member of the family’s mental health condition. As the family members gain understanding, they can be more supportive, be watchful for unhealthy patterns in that individual, and overall, simply function better as a unit all working toward a common goal.
Family counseling at Little Elm Christian Counseling can take the form of a variety of types of counseling as listed above, and it depends on the needs of each family.
Some of the most common reasons that families seek counseling are:
- To help the family weather a change in life stage or season
- To give a blended family more tools for communication and becoming a new unit
- To assess the mental wellness of one or more family members and help others in the family understand how to be supportive of that person
- To grieve the loss of a family member, pet, or major life transition such as a move, divorce, or job change
- To help parents understand the struggles that an adolescent or teen is going through and learn coping and communication skills that help
- To give children language to express their feelings about how they perceive stress in the home that may be due to work/life balance issues among the parents
- To help one or more family members who have been self-isolating from the rest of the family or expressing feelings of loneliness, sadness, anger or depression, and to give the rest of the family tools to help that person and function better as a family
- To help a family heal from a traumatic event that occurred within the family
- To provide context when a family member is dealing with issues of connectedness that makes it stressful for the rest of the family. These issues can be anything from being adopted or struggling with an eating disorder to low self-esteem or gender confusion.
At Little Elm Christian Counseling, we often see that families perceive counseling as a way to “fix” a major problem when, in reality, counseling is a healthy pursuit for any family at different times and in various seasons of life. Everyone benefits from having an outsider perspective to identify where families can improve on communication, vulnerability, and conflict resolution.
Because God creates men and women, boys and girls in His own triune image, He wants to give us the best relational health we can have among our family units. Families who seek family counseling in Little Elm, Texas can benefit by learning skills and strategies to better express their own feelings, respect others’ differences, and come to resolutions that honor everyone involved.
If you think your family could benefit from family counseling at Little Elm Christian Counseling, we have family counselors ready to talk with you. Contact us today so we can help you find the best fit for your situation.
Get connected with a Christian Counselor
Please contact our reception team at
(469) 333-6163