Family Therapy

Families are regarded as the basic unit of society: while not always related by blood but strengthened by mutual choice and love, families are composed of adults and children who live, grow, and weather life’s ups and downs together. Every family is unique and shaped by different circumstances, whether influenced by the parents’ relationship or resulting from events in children’s lives. When these circumstances affect the family dynamics, remedies like family therapy and counselling may help restore healthy communication and safety at home in Toronto and across Ontario.

Stronger Family Ties

At CITC, we are committed to empowering families across Ontario to thrive by ensuring that their homes are a safe space. We help parents and children communicate and work through issues like stress, mood disorders, and difficulties with emotion regulation. Through family counselling, we can help families model healthy communication behaviours, manage their emotions, and support each other’s needs.

What is Family Therapy?

Family therapy helps families strengthen their relationships by addressing issues that affect the stability of their home life. Family counselling offers a safe space where family members can discuss their struggles and address the underlying behaviours, thoughts, and feelings that drive these. Through cognitive behavioural therapy, families can work together to break these unhealthy patterns and replace them with positive behaviours reinforcing mutual love and support.

Is Family Therapy Right for You?

Everything starts at home, where we first learn right and wrong, hone our skills and talents, express ourselves, and build lasting connections with people we love and trust. However, different circumstances can impact the stability of our home life. To repair this, we need a safe, judgment-free space to express our emotions to those who love us most and work together to restore mutual respect and support.

Family therapy is recommended for families who:

• Struggle to express thoughts and emotions and agree on mutual boundaries
• Struggle to correct negative behaviours in a healthy and respectful manner
• Want to have a closer and stronger relationship
• Want to grow their family by fostering or adoption
• Are undergoing divorce or separation
• Face challenges related to physical illness and mental health conditions like depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Families

Our family therapists at CITC are here to support you and the ones you love most. We know what family means to you and how much you want to protect yours.

Our family counselling services are rooted in cognitive behavioural therapy, internal family systems (IFS) therapy, and emotion-focused family therapy techniques. We give families a safe space for processing and communicating their emotional needs and working together to set mutual goals for breaking unhealthy patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions. We work with you to strengthen your family by learning healthy coping and communication mechanisms, as well as positive behaviours to practice at home every day.

Our Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Process for Families

1. History: Our family therapists get to know you and your family, establish your history to understand the dynamics of your relationship, and assess the stability of your home life.
2. Challenges and Goals: We will explore the challenges you face, whether brought on by changes to the adults’ relationship or issues impacting physical and mental health. We will also establish goals to address parenting challenges and enhance family dynamics.
3. Outcomes: We will begin family counselling by identifying negative behaviours, thoughts, and feelings. Our family therapists will create a safe space for open and honest dialogue to improve the relationship between family members, learn healthy coping mechanisms and behaviours for handling conflict, and grow in an environment of mutual respect and trust.

CBT Family Therapy Techniques

Our family therapists employ cognitive behavioural, IFS, and emotion-focused therapies to support your family on your journey to break unhealthy patterns and restore healthy and stable relationships at home. We help you practice these techniques in family counselling:

• Mood check-in: Our cognitive behavioural therapy process starts by checking on each other’s moods. Our family therapists will use these as a benchmark to measure progress throughout your counselling sessions. Many family members often start family therapy feeling disheartened and angry, but we work with each one of you to improve your moods and regulate emotions.
• Agenda setting: Each family member takes turns verbalizing issues they want to address in every session. Together with your family therapist, collaboratively decide on what to tackle in that time to work towards common goals.
• Acceptable feelings: Families examine a list of feelings and decide which ones are acceptable to express within their family system to promote open and healthy communication in a respectful manner.
• Role-playing: Family members are invited to act out real-life scenarios to model healthy communication techniques and behaviours. Your family therapist may also join in to show positive interactions and techniques you can practice at home.
• Chair technique: Your family therapist may place an empty chair in the middle of the room and invite each family member to visualize the problem they want to address by speaking directly to it and separating it from the person feeling this negative emotion to avoid being blamed.
• Homework: The time you spend in family therapy is only a small fraction of your life. To achieve meaningful change, you must practice the techniques you learned at home.

Nurture Family Relationships in Counselling

CITC is your partner in restoring a healthy family relationship. Our family therapy and counselling services in Toronto are immensely successful in bringing families closer together, repairing old wounds, and growing stronger over the years.

We work with each family member to break unhealthy behavioural patterns and practice healthy and open communication and interaction techniques to reinforce mutual love and trust. Through the years, we have observed declining family conflict in our clients and healthier family dynamics. Trust us to offer a safe space for your family to do this work and ensure each member reaches their full potential with the help of a community that loves and nurtures them.