Why Family Therapy
I often tell my clients that we don’t heal in silos. This is particularly true when working with complex trauma and attachment injuries. Individual clients will often tell me that it feels like the therapeutic progress they’ve made “goes out the window” when they are in the presence of their families. This makes complete sense, as that is ground zero for attachment. We first learned about connection, emotion, safety, attunement within the context of caregivers and close family. And they learned about connection, emotion, safety, and attunement with their own caregivers in an endless cycle of legacy.
Often it takes intentional work alongside an emotional guide in family therapy to address and update lapses in safety, connection, and attachment. Families come to therapy for many reasons, including:
Blended Family Challenges
Life Transitions
Longstanding Ruptures
Estrangement Recovery
Substance Use Disorders
Differences in Values
Challenges with In-laws
Grief, Loss & Change
High Conflict Fighting
Parent-Child Issues
Loneliness In Families
One of the most common experiences I hear from my clients is that they feel isolated and alone within their families. I often hear:
I feel like I’m on the outside looking in.
When I have turned to my family in the past, I often feel worse.
I can’t be myself around them.
I feel like their love for me is conditional.
This experience of feeling deeply alone when you are not alone is heartbreaking and points to attachment injury, disconnection, and the need for intentional repair.
Why do we disconnect?
There are endless reasons why disconnection occurs in families, but the core is usually a lack of felt safety. Somewhere along the line, individuals in the family learned that is is not safe to connect. Sometimes it may actually feel worse to connect, especially when we are met with criticism, advice-giving, lack of reciprocity, or full out rejection.
Many factors are often present, including issues like generational trauma, acculturation stressors, different learned patterns of attachment, generational divides, clashes around levels of individuation and togetherness, personality differences, disagreements around values, and low levels of emotional attunement.
Family therapy creates a space for us to face disconnection and its causes, and work towards rebuilding safe attachments.
Shifting Family Cultures
As time passes, new generations emerge, family members arrive and depart, and family and societal culture evolves– except when it doesn’t. Sometimes families can get stuck operating from a place of legacy: we’ve just always done it this way! And while many of those legacies connect families and deepen ties, without awareness or reflection, some values, traditions, and emotional patterns may end up steamrolling connections within the family.
Reauthoring Values & Family Norms
When I work with families, we often collaborative together to reauthor the family culture, reworking our understanding of traditions, expectations, and values. This work can be inspiring and reconnecting, but it can also be deeply painful. Some family members may feel immense loss with changes to the family culture. Something as simple a replacing a beloved dish at a holiday dinner can spark feelings of loss, grief, anger, and fear, let alone reexamining our beliefs around ideas like roles, gender, sexuality, religion, morality, and ethics. Engaging in this work without safe attachments as a family is all the harder, and so many of the families that initially come to me have been stuck in a holding pattern of avoidance.
Yet, without realizing it, many families unintentionally center their values, traditions and legacies over the connections with the actual humans around us that they love.
Radical Acceptance
Sometimes, we reach impasses in family narrative work, particularly around values, which are often deeply engrained on a neuroscience level and take time to shift. When our family is unable to align with us on certain values, it can feel like an invalidation of our identity and lived experience and a rejection of who we are as human beings. It is extremely challenging to feel safe when the people we love invalidate who we are through their values and ideologies.
When such impasses exist, I work with each member of the family on radical acceptance, collaborative boundary setting, resetting expectations, and the development of mutual respect of difference.
How I Work with Families
HISTORY TAKING
At the beginning of family therapy, I spend time getting to know each family’s story. I pay close attention to culture, trauma history, reported challenges, emotional blueprints, body language, verbal language, family roles, each person’s narratives, and overarching themes. I often do breakout sessions one-on-one with each member in the family to connect more deeply and build stronger foundations of trust and rapport.
REFLECTING PROCESSES
Using Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT), I reflect back noted patterns of emotional pursuit, withdrawal, connection and disconnection. I integrate an Internal Family System (IFS) lens to understand the protective parts driving these behaviors and the intended and unintended impacts on connection and felt safety.
DEEPENING EMOTIONS
We spend time looking carefully at emotions, including primary and secondary emotions, their impacts on physical sensation, and core messages tethered to them. As an attachment therapist, I’m always interested in what attachment with caregivers looked like in early life. How did each family member learn (or did not learn) to receive soothing, comfort, and connection? What did emotional attunment look like? How were emotional needs met, or not met? And how did issues like culture, religion, acculturation, ethnicity, generation, gender, and lived experience impact connection, attachment, and emotional development.
TURNING TOWARDS
During the working phase of treatment, I will often ask family members to turn towards one another to share their emotional experiences when it feels safe enough to do so. These moments are known as enactments, and they allow us to begin forging new patterns of connection, communication, and emotional vulnerability during sessions. We spend time processing how the enactments land, and working to soften protective parts that may be continuing to show up.
If this sounds like a good fit for you and your family
Danielle Palomares is a Registered AMFT 137663 supervised by Alejandro Sandoval, LMFT 89577
as an Associate of Sandoval Therapy
LINKS
LOCATION
Sandoval Therapy
491 South Marengo Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91101
