Addiction and mental health problems hurt more than just your teen who suffers these problems. These behavioral health issues affect your whole family. This is why family therapy activities play such a big role in your teen’s treatment. Through family therapy and under the guidance of a licensed therapist, your family heals and then rebuilds for a better future.
What are the benefits of family therapy?
Family therapy in Los Angeles, California, offers many benefits. In this therapy, your family works on your problems in a trusting, controlled, and safe environment. For example, proven benefits of family therapy include:
- Improved communication
- Healthier boundaries
- Better family dynamics and patterns
- Enhanced problem solving
- Deeper compassion and empathy
- Improved anger management
- Reduced conflict
Family therapy improves your relationships overall. You work together as a unit after a crisis, develop greater honesty and trust, support each other, and also reduce the stress in your household. You also learn to forgive each other and resolve conflicts after struggles.
Examples of Family Therapy Activities
For your family’s counseling sessions, the therapist comes up with some family therapy ideas based on initial conversations or a few sessions with your loved ones. These ideas lead to developing some therapy activities for you and your family to take part in during upcoming sessions. Some family therapy activities work very well with the therapist, then easily translate to home use in the future. You can use the tools you learn in therapy to maintain the health and progress of your household over the coming years. Some family therapy ideas include:
- Miracle Question: This exercise helps your family explore their goals for the future. This helps you all understand what individuals in the family want and need for happiness. It involves asking a miracle question like, “If a miracle occurred in your sleep tonight, upon waking, what would tell you that life was suddenly better?”
- Colored Candy: This exercise helps your family ease to therapy as an icebreaker. You divide a package of colored candies among your loved ones, with each person sorting their candies by color. Then you ask a certain question for each color. The number of those colored candies your loved one holds is the number of truthful ways they must answer the question.
- Emotions Ball: Use a marker to write several emotions on a beach ball, such as joyful, silly, sad, mad, or lonely. Toss the ball between family members, with each person describing a time they felt the emotion directly facing them.
These are just some of the techniques counselors or therapists may use in family therapy. The key takeaway when approaching family therapy is that it is designed to help everyone in the family unit better understand substance use disorder. It allows not just the individual immediately affected by the disease of addiction, but those around them identify, express, and deal with the mental health issues that spring from it.
Building Trust and Communication in Your Family after Addiction or Mental Health Problems
When your teen needs help with addiction or mental health problems, you cannot sacrifice your whole family’s needs. Instead, open up communication and build trust through a treatment center providing family therapy. Besides family therapy, programs, and therapies your young person needs for recovery include:
- Dual diagnosis treatment
- Art, rock, and yoga therapy
- Residential treatment
- Partial hospitalization program (PHP)
- Intensive outpatient program (IOP)
- Alumni program
Destinations for Teens in Woodland Hills, CA, provides all of the above therapies and programs. Through these methods, everyone grows healthier, happier, and stronger despite your struggles. So call Destinations for Teens now at 877.466.0620 to stop feeling desperate and start enjoying better trust and harmony in your household.