Each year, several colleagues and I teach an online couples and family therapy training program for mental health professionals. While we learn concepts and techniques, much of the training happens experientially. Trainees practice “therapy” by role-playing as therapists and family members. The “therapists” get feedback, make mistakes, and try again.
But learning doesn’t happen only when trainees play the therapist. They may learn just as much by inhabiting the experience of a parent, child, teenager, or partner—feeling what it is like to be misunderstood, defended, challenged, or genuinely understood by a therapist. They also learn by observing role-plays and noticing the small moments when a conversation becomes safer, more defensive, more vulnerable, or more connected.
This experiential approach has reinforced something I have come to believe after many years of working with children, adolescents, couples, and families: good family therapy is not primarily about teaching people to communicate correctly. It is about helping them communicate more fully.
Family Therapy Begins With Safety
One of the first things I teach therapists is that before we can help a family address difficult problems, we need to create enough emotional safety for family members to talk about them.
Families may come to therapy in part because they are having trouble communicating effectively. But communication problems are not always simply a matter of lacking the right skills. Family members may have important things to express but find their conversations quickly become organized around defensiveness and self-protection. Parents may criticize when they are worried. Teenagers may withdraw when they feel misunderstood. Partners may press one another for answers or retreat when they feel overwhelmed. Family therapy can help people communicate more effectively while also helping them understand and express the feelings, needs, and concerns driving these patterns.
The family therapist’s first job is to help create a conversation in which people feel understood well enough to become curious about one another again.
One principle we emphasize in training is: When you feel yourself losing empathy for someone, become more curious about their experience.
That doesn’t mean agreeing with hurtful behavior or pretending everyone’s behavior is equally helpful. It means working to understand each family member’s experience—especially when someone’s behavior is making that understanding difficult. When someone in a family feels that the therapist has already decided that they are the problem, meaningful family therapy becomes very difficult.
Role-play makes this lesson especially vivid. A trainee playing a family member who is angry, guarded, or hard to reach may feel isolated when the therapist seems aligned with everyone else in the room. Conversely, a therapist’s small gesture of curiosity or understanding can make it safer to listen, reflect, and participate.
Helping People Communicate More Fully
Family therapy often helps family members communicate more effectively—using “I-statements,” listening without interrupting, and finding ways to express strong feelings without using hurtful words. These skills can make difficult conversations safer and more productive. But good communication involves more than how something is said; it also involves helping people discover and express more fully what they are trying to say.
In training, I encourage therapists to listen for what may be emerging underneath the words.
A teenager who says, “You never trust me,” may also be saying, “I want you to see that I’m growing up.”
A parent who says, “She doesn’t care about anything,” may be expressing fear: “I’m scared that my daughter is struggling, and I don’t know how to reach her.”
A partner who complains, “He’s too needy,” may also be acknowledging, “I know I’m not giving him the closeness he wants from me.”
Family therapists learn to listen for these hidden feelings, needs, hopes, and acknowledgments. We may reframe an accusation, slow down an interaction, or help someone find words for a more vulnerable feeling underneath anger.
The goal is not to replace a person’s authentic language with “therapy language.” It is to help people say more of what they actually mean.
Helping Families Move From Anger Toward Vulnerability
Anger can tell us that something important has happened or that an important need is unmet. But when families get trapped in anger, they can lose sight of the more tender feelings underneath.
Behind criticism may be disappointment.
Someone may withdraw because of fear of disapproval.
Controlling behavior may be a result of anxiety.
Repeated demands for attention may represent loneliness and longing.
One skill we practice in our family therapy training is helping therapists listen for these deeper emotions without dismissing the anger that brought the family into the room. When family members begin to recognize the hurt, fear, love, hope, or longing beneath one another’s defenses, the conversation can change.
The person who seemed unreasonable becomes easier to understand. And once people feel understood, they often become better able to understand others.
This is another reason experiential training matters. Playing the role of a family member can help a therapist feel from the inside how anger and defensiveness can coexist with love, fear, or longing. Observing a role-play can also make visible what is harder to notice during a difficult conversation: how one person’s self-protection can trigger another person’s self-protection, creating a cycle neither person intends.
Finding Strengths Helps Families Go Deeper
Family therapy should also help families remember what is working.
This does not mean minimizing serious problems or trying to make everyone “look on the bright side.” Families who come to therapy may already feel discouraged, ashamed, or frightened about their ability to repair their relationships. If therapy focuses exclusively on everything they are doing wrong, that discouragement can deepen.
So therapists also look for competence, affection, resilience, good intentions, successful exceptions, and moments when family members have already solved a small part of the problem.
Sometimes family therapists emphasize strengths not instead of going deeper, but in order to go deeper.
A family that begins to recover a sense of hope and dignity may become more willing to examine painful patterns, acknowledge mistakes, hear difficult feelings, and take emotional risks with one another.
Helping the Whole Family Work Better
Family therapy also focuses on more than individual family members’ feelings. We pay attention to what happens between people.
Who gets pulled into arguments? Who withdraws? Which family member tries to keep the peace? Does a child end up carrying tensions between adults? Can parents work together effectively? Does everyone have a voice? Are boundaries clear enough that children can be children and adults can take responsibility for adult problems?
A family therapist helps families develop ways of relating that make everyday family life work better.
Sometimes this involves helping parents become more coordinated and confident. Other times, it means strengthening the relationship between a parent and child. Sometimes it means helping family members step out of a repetitive cycle in which everyone’s understandable attempt to protect themselves accidentally makes someone else’s reaction worse.
The goal is not to create a family that never argues. Healthy families disagree.
The goal is to help families better remain connected while they disagree—and to repair their relationships when things go wrong.
Therapists Make Mistakes, Too
One reason I use role-play when training family therapists is that family therapy is complicated. Several people sit in the room, each with different experiences, and the therapist will inevitably misunderstand someone at times.
A therapist can try something, discover that it didn’t land as intended, hear how it felt to the trainee playing the family member, and try again. Observers can notice what helped the therapist recover the relationship. The mistake itself becomes part of the learning.
What matters is what happens next.
If I misunderstand a child, parent, or partner, I want to notice it, acknowledge it, and become curious about what I missed. A therapist’s mistake can become an opportunity to show families something they themselves need: relationships do not depend on perfect understanding. They depend upon our capacity to recognize misunderstandings and repair them.
That may be one of the most hopeful lessons family therapy can offer.
Creating Conversations Families Can Continue at Home
The therapist helps create a different kind of conversation: one with enough safety for people to become less defensive, enough curiosity for people to listen, enough emotional depth for important feelings to emerge, and enough hope for family members to try something different.
Over time, families increasingly learn to have those conversations without us. At its best, family therapy helps family members know one another more deeply, express difficult feelings more honestly, respond to one another more compassionately, and build relationships sturdy enough to withstand the inevitable stresses of family life.
That is much of what I hope therapists learn by doing, observing, inhabiting, making mistakes, and trying again in our training—and what I hope the families we work with will experience in their own relationships.
-Posted by Jonah Green
Jonah Green, a therapist at Jonah Green and Associates, LLC, offers therapy for children, teens, families, and adults in North Bethesda, Maryland, serving clients in Montgomery County, DC, and the surrounding areas.