5 Effective Therapeutic Family Therapy Activities

Family therapy is a helpful tool for many parents and their children. During family therapy sessions, you and your loved ones will work with an experienced therapist to build healthy communication skills and stronger family ties. Parents can learn about what their teen is facing, and teens can learn about the importance of boundaries and familial support. Therapists might use a variety of family therapy activities during sessions to help families connect and open up. Some activities can also be used at home to maintain a healthy family system.

If anyone in your family is working through mental health issues, these activities can help you rebuild understanding and trust. Try them today!

What to Expect in Family Therapy

In family therapy, you’ll spend time talking with a therapist about the struggles your family is facing and learning about tools and strategies to promote healthier relationships. We complement these sessions with individual or group therapy where children or parents can work through challenges independently. 

At Ascend Healthcare, we believe families are interconnected — that one person’s behavior can shift and alter the entire system. We aim to support parents to better understand their role in their child’s behavior and empower them to become more connected, more consistent, and build stronger attachment relationships through therapeutic family activities. Restructuring the family system can lead to long-term positive outcomes.

Every parent with a child in our program can count on additional support and care through our independent and family therapy activities. We currently offer two approaches on a weekly basis, including parent effectiveness training and parent DBT groups.

Weekly Parent Effectiveness Training

This group aims to support families in fostering parent-child relationships rooted in warmth and respect by teaching effective communication skills. The skills and philosophies taught in these sessions underpin many modern parenting practices, including gentle, peaceful, and attachment parenting.

Parent DBT Groups

Parent DBT groups (dialectical behavior therapy) focus on supporting parents in improving awareness and mindfulness of their own emotional state when engaging with their child. It also touches on tolerating their child’s distress, as well as ways to effectively set limits and boundaries. Our incredible program director Matt Metcalf, who is a certified DBT therapist, facilitates these sessions.

Family Therapy Activities to Build Trust

During your sessions, you’ll participate in several family therapy activities that might help you talk about challenges you have faced in the past or conflicts that could arise in the future. Every member of your family will have a chance to talk and participate.

Your therapist might also give you family therapy activities that you can do at home to continue the important work you are doing in sessions. Some activities that you can incorporate into your family time at home include:

• The Miracle Question
• The Emotions Ball
• Mirroring Activity
• Colored Candy
• Magic Key

These therapeutic family activities can help reinforce the lessons that you’re learning in therapy and ensure healthy communication at all times.

Family Therapy at Ascend Healthcare

Family therapy activities that build trust are a vital part of the program at Ascend. No matter which program would best help your teen and your family heal, all of them include family therapy sessions because a healthy family system is at the core of a happy, healthy person.

If you’re ready to learn more about our programs or enroll your child in one of our facilities, reach out to our admissions team today for additional information.