Family Counseling Stakes
For family groups that have found themselves seeking out the help they require in family counseling, the fears and anxieties about failing can be terrifying. Parents understandably fear losing their children or, as one parent put it, “screwing them up for life.”
Sandy:
Sol and I had been in marriage counseling before. Honestly, we wanted to be together and loved each other, and marriage counseling helped us work it out, but if it had failed, our lives would have gone on. With the kids, though, and family counseling, having it not work just wasn’t an option. There was no “going on” if we weren’t able to help out the kids. You can’t just walk away from that. We had this shot to get it right and help our family, and I’ll tell you that I was completely terrified of messing it up and having it not help. The consequences of failure here were completely different than they were with marriage counseling.
Family counseling generally deals with complex, multi-person and multi-generational issues that are not as easy to untangle as many common marital issues are. Family counseling almost always included children, and a parent-child relationship can be right or wrong on a multitude of levels, and sibling relationships as well.
Family counseling is often a resort that parents turn to after the family has already reached a crisis point and has no other choice. Where couples will often seek out marriage counseling when the marriage is in trouble, families often seek out family counseling only after the family has already passed a breaking point. In summary, family counseling is usually taken on later, in an emergency crisis, and the ramifications of helping a child are usually greater.
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