All of us have struggled in our own way to deal with the effects of the Coronavirus. But if you are a parent, you most likely have even more concerns about how the stress of what is going on in the world is impacting on the emotional health of your children. This may be especially true with return to school just around the corner.
You’ve most likely taken certain precautions over the past few months to ensure your family’s health and well-being. You’ve made sure to follow social distancing and wearing masks inside public places.
And, at some point you might have started to limit the amount of news or social media you’ve consumed, particularly if you noticed it was making you or/and your family stressed or anxious.
But there is something else you can do to help ease the burden of the pandemic on your family, and that is seek family therapy from a licensed mental health therapist.
What Family Therapy Offers:
There are many models of family therapy. Often when people think of family therapy, they think of the traditional approach that involves everyone in the family being in the same room at the same time. At Bedford Therapy, we also provide an approach called Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) where the therapist meets primarily with parents, and children are invited to join for specific sessions as needed. With EFFT the therapist coaches parents to help improve family communication.
Family therapy helps family members learn to manage and express their emotions in helpful ways. This can be particularly helpful if your family has struggled with stress and tension on a regular basis, and is struggling even more in the midst of the Coronavirus.
Or if even if your family has been doing generally okay before all of this happened, it can be a really positive experience to talk to a neutral third party to share the burdens and shed some of the stress you have been carrying. A therapist can validate your experience and offer strategies to support your family.
One of the biggest benefits of Emotion Focused Family Therapy is that it gives parents a space to talk about the children and family’s struggles in a way they could not if their children were in the room. EFFT can even help family’s where the teen has no interest in therapy or has no motivation to change.
And if you have any concerns about how healthy it is to meet with a therapist in person right know, know that we meet together on a secure video call – we simply meet each other virtually using a computer, tablet or smart phone from a comfortable space in your own home.
Lois Ells is a Clinical Social Worker in Halifax, NS and is a certified advanced Emotion Focused Family Therapist who specializes in working with families to help them learn to manage and express their emotions in helpful ways. If you’d like to book a free 15 minute consultation with Lois click here or call her Assistant Laura at (902) 800-4627 to schedule.
Sources:
https://www.emotionfocusedfamilytherapy.org/efft-the-model/