Family and Couples work
Offering families or couples a therapeutic space, where each and every person has the chance to speak, listen and learn from one another can heal many hurts.
Couples and families seek therapeutic input for many different reasons – including mental health and / or relationship difficulties – usually at points within the family ‘life cycle’. As relationships change through birth, school entry, adolescence, leaving home, marriage, divorce, new partners, redundancy, retirement and death, so too can the balance between family members and couples. It is often at these stress points that difficulties emerge.
We use our expertise and specialist training to identify patterns in how families or couples talk, act and show emotion. We explore how families or couples respond in times of stress, and what leads them to come together or draw apart. We also look at where patterns in communication and behaviour might have come from, how they developed over time and how they could be different in the future.
Every family and couple has a multitude of unique strengths that they have developed over years of navigating difficulties together. Our work seeks to mobilise these resources, and reconnect couples and families with their strengths and resilience when difficulties have reached an impasse.
We also offer trauma focused family interventions. This can be with an individual family member who has experienced a trauma within the family such as a traumatic birth or harm from a family member. Or we can work with the family together when they have experienced something such as traumatic bereavement or a life threatening event. We often use EMDR in this work.
Dr Jocelyne Kenny has completed training in Systemic Approaches to Working with Individuals, Families and Organisations to intermediate level and has been approved by the Association of Family Therapy as being competent to practice this. Her status can be checked at www.aft.org.uk