Family Therapy

I drove over to the hospital yesterday for a family therapy session.  I'm never quite certain exactly what family therapy is, and maybe there isn't a definition.  It seems to have a lot of different aims, depending on the therapist and the mood of the people present.  I noticed that Rethink are rather cautious about family therapy. In their book "Caring and Coping" they say:

Family therapy was originally set up to help families support a family member experiencing addiction, eating disorder or other self-destructive behaviour.  More recently, family therapy has been adapted to support families caring for someone with mental illness.  This can be very helpful for some families, though it can sometimes be quite stressful and it may be difficult to keep everyone involved fully.

For some family therapists, the focus seems to be on the therapy, less on the family.  We have had some sessions where the therapist spent most of the time quizzing Julie about her experiences, while we listened in.  It can be helpful, though it can also feel a bit voyeuristic.  Occasionally the focus has drifted to the rest of us - one therapist liked to have her brother along, for example, and sometimes directed the conversation at him instead.  But most of the time, and with most of the therapists, the focus has been pretty fair and square on Julie. Even if the conversation is about home leave, for example, her experience is firmly in the foreground, and its not really been the place for us to raise our feelings about it.  In fact, our current therapist will tell us off if we stray into discussing our feelings because she feels it makes Julie anxious.

It is never entirely clear whether or not family therapists are there to support us or not.  Some of them clearly do see this as part of their role: we had a lovely chap for a while during the early stages of Julie's admission, who was very good on providing information.  He would explain about her illness, for example, or how the system worked.  If we spoke to him on our own he would spontaneously tell us things about her that we didn't know: that she had just beaten him in a game of pool, for example.  It was the sort of little detail we craved, and we couldn't get from the ward staff.  We were missing her so much, home visits were banned, and visits to the hospital took place in these dreary meeting rooms where none of us felt relaxed: that sort of detail of how she was coping on the ward was just what we needed.

Other family therapists seem more interested in getting us to thrash out solutions to Julie's problems.  This can become rather confrontational.  Joe had a horrible family therapy session last week without me, when he was presented with a long list of demands that Julie had written down.  Embarrassed and beleaguered, he tried to explain some of the practical difficulties in meeting them, but was accused of being negative.  He felt awful about it, and was very unhappy.  This was why this week I went alone, giving him a rest.  I'm not sure he really will go back to family therapy and I do wonder what it would achieve if he did.  His relationship with Julie seems to be much better outside the sessions.