The Benefits of Family Therapy for Trauma Survivors

Nearly half of Americans will experience a potentially traumatic event during their lifetimes, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and millions will go on to develop long-lasting and deeply emotional responses from those experiences. 

While many people think of trauma as a very violent or extreme single event, like a car accident or house fire, you can experience trauma from an ongoing series of events, like bullying or other types of abuse. 

Individual therapy plays a crucial role in helping you overcome trauma and the psychological effects it causes. But family therapy can also be important, helping your loved ones understand your emotional responses so they can be more supportive of you and feel supported.

At Conduit Behavioral Health in Baltimore, Maryland, our team helps trauma survivors recover and thrive with therapies tailored to each patient’s unique needs and challenges. In this post, we review the basics of family therapy and its positive role in helping patients of all ages move forward from trauma.

Family therapy: The basics

As the name implies, family counseling applies the tenets of psychotherapy within a family setting. The basic premise is simple: A family is a unit composed of individuals, and when challenges, like a traumatic experience confront one family member, it can affect the function of the entire unit.

Therapy focuses on the family as a group of interconnected “parts” or members comprising individual and communal values, beliefs, thought patterns, and behaviors. Family therapists work with family members to improve communication and interpersonal skills so every member feels valued, supported, and “heard.”

Family therapy helps resolve conflicts and find room for solutions and compromises. It also identifies unhealthy, entrenched behaviors and replaces them with positive actions and reactions. The overarching goal is to improve the family unit's health by addressing the members' individual needs and the group's overall needs and expectations.

Benefits for trauma survivors

Your family has a major influence on your life and your emotional well-being. As a result, the way your family reacts to and deals with your responses to trauma can have a big impact on how well you manage those responses. 

Not surprisingly, family therapy can offer significant benefits in helping survivors and their family members learn ways to understand each other while providing much-needed support to the survivor. One of the goals of family therapy is to provide a supportive, nonjudgmental arena for sharing feelings and concerns, enabling the survivor to explain their experience and its effects on their well-being fully.

Better communication

Your therapist will help you and your family members learn better ways of communicating so you can rebuild important connections and relationships that may have suffered following your trauma. Through various activities, your therapist will help you and your family learn to listen proactively while practicing compassionate understanding.

Improving coping skills

As a trauma survivor, you need to learn new ways to effectively cope with the flood of emotions you're dealing with. Not surprisingly, that flood can affect family members, too. With family therapy, every family member can improve their coping skills to be a more effective support system while also managing their own needs and emotions.

Overcoming feelings of guilt or shame

Many trauma survivors have feelings of shame, blame, guilt, or even anger that can interfere with family dynamics. Or it could be the family members who are judging the trauma survivor and assigning a share of blame. 

Family therapy helps family members understand the roots of these feelings so they can be addressed and managed to develop healthier dynamics among all members while allowing you to shed negative thought patterns that could interfere with your recovery and healing.

Developing personal strength and resiliency

Everyone in a family has a role, and the characteristics of each role can be very subtle. How we "fit in" with our family can also affect our resiliency in other areas of our lives. 

In family therapy, you'll learn to overcome preconceived notions about your family identity so you can feel stronger about your role in the family setting and the rest of your life.

Learn more about family therapy

Family therapy serves an important role in helping to break the cycle of trauma and strengthen familial bonds and support networks. To learn more about family therapy or to find out how we can help you cope with a traumatic experience, request an appointment online or over the phone with the team at Conduit Behavioral Health today.