Every family goes through periods of difficulty. Whether that’s ongoing conflict, a significant life transition, the impact of a mental health difficulty on the wider family, or a sense that communication has broken down between family members. Family therapy offers a space where everyone’s perspective can be heard, so that together you can make sense of what’s happening and find new ways forward.

 

Families can take many different formations, and I work with the shape of family that’s in front of me, parents and children, adult siblings, adult children and their parents, grandparents and grandchildren, step family members, or other significant people who play an important role. Where it’s helpful, this can also extend beyond the household to include wider family or community members.

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How I Work with Families

As a systemic therapist, I understand difficulties not as belonging to one person, but as patterns that develop within a family’s relationships, history, and context. Rather than looking for a single cause or a single person to “fix,” I’m interested in how each family member experiences what’s happening, and how these different perspectives fit together.

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Sessions are collaborative. I aim to create a space where every family member can find their own way of participating and being heard, at a pace that feels manageable, whatever the ages and generations involved. We’ll work together to understand unhelpful patterns, build on the family’s existing strengths, and think about what change might look like for you.

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Culture often plays an important part in this. Families carry different ideas, sometimes inherited across generations about what a family is, who belongs to it, and how it should function. These ideas shape family scripts and rules: how closeness or conflict should be handled, how distress should be understood or spoken about, and whose voice carries the most weight. When family members hold different or clashing versions of these scripts whether because of migration, because a family brings together more than one cultural background, or because a family member’s identity or sexuality sits differently within the family’s expectations — this can become a source of real tension, particularly for LGBTQ+ family members navigating acceptance, disclosure, or belonging within the family system. Part of my work is helping families make these often unspoken rules visible, so they can be understood and, where needed, renegotiated.

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What Families Bring to Therapy

Families come to see me for a wide range of reasons, including communication difficulties and conflict, the impact of parental separation or blended family life, adjusting to a significant transition, and supporting a family member through anxiety, depression, or other mental health difficulties. I have particular experience supporting families where a family member is neurodivergent or LGBTQ+, families navigating the impact of migration on their sense of identity and belonging, and families finding their way between different or clashing cultural expectations. I also work with families supporting a young person through adolescence, families affected by eating disorders, and multi-generational families including adult children and grandparents.

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Getting Started

Reaching out for family support can feel like a big step, and different family members may feel differently about it. I offer a free, up to 20-minute phone consultation so we can discuss what’s brought your family to this point and think together about whether this feels like the right way forward.