Many families in Mexico are choosing The Wave Clinic for residential mental health support for a young person. The Wave’s residential programs combine exceptional clinical care with education, inspiring experiences, and social projects, supporting young people to plan for the future and develop the skills they need to thrive.
Just as young people at The Wave benefit from a new environment, memories, and emotional connections, so do their families. Families can often become stuck in unhelpful practices and patterns that are difficult to change in a home setting. That’s why we invite families to a week of residential family therapy at our centre in Malaysia for a journey of reconnection and transformation.
Understanding Family Therapy in Adolescent Mental Health Support
Families often play a crucial role in young people’s recovery from mental health problems. Family members are usually a key source of emotional and practical support that adolescents and young adults can turn to in more challenging times. Family systems and the relationships within them can also help to reinforce positive behaviours and discourage harmful ones.
On the other hand, certain family dynamics can maintain unhelpful behaviours, making recovery more difficult. This can happen even when parents and other family members have the best intentions; families often don’t recognise when relationships and practices have become harmful. Unresolved conflicts within families can also trigger difficult emotions and make recovery more difficult.
That’s why family therapy is so important. It addresses the structures surrounding a young person, supporting lasting and resilient recovery.
Family therapy takes many different forms and has many different aims. These include:
- Teaching family members skills to support a young person in recovery
- Helping family members to identify unhelpful dynamics and replace them with more positive ones
- Creating a positive home environment
- Learning conflict resolution strategies
- Developing crisis plans
Why Is Residential Family Therapy Important?
It’s very difficult for someone to become well in the same environment that they were unwell. This is not only true for a young person with mental health problems but also for the family system that surrounds them. Just as a young person benefits from a change of environment, the practices, dynamics, and relationships within families often require a different setting to grow and change.
Residential family therapy provides this change of environment, where families can explore different ways of being and incorporate new practices and perspectives. It supports families to find new ways of creating and connecting across the family system through new memories and experiences.
At The Wave, this process of creation happens through family-intensive weeks. Families are invited to our centre for a week of enriching experiences and therapeutic support. This includes family experiences, process groups, art therapy, family systems therapy, and other modalities according to each family’s needs.
We only work with one family at a time, working with the whole therapeutic team supporting their child. During this week, families can share the experience of their young person at The Wave and participate in activities, therapy sessions, and daily routines together.
Our family-intensive weeks don’t focus on the past – they’re about making something new together. We support families to break free of circular conversations, creating memories and experiences while working in therapy. We aim to deconstruct parents’ fears and build new futures.
What Are Some Types of Family Therapy?
At The Wave, we offer several different types of family therapy to support a young person’s recovery journey. These include family systems therapy, art therapy, and skills-learning sessions.
We combine these modalities with enriching experiences that enable transformation and radical change.
DBT Family Skills Sessions
DBT family skills sessions are based on dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT). DBT is a type of behavioural therapy initially developed for borderline personality disorder. It combines a radical acceptance of experiences, memories, and emotions with the acquisition of skills and coping mechanisms that promote positive change.
DBT family skills approaches offer skills-training sessions to family members of a young person receiving mental health support. Some core DBT-family skills are validation, mindfulness, radical acceptance, and emotional regulation. Family members learn how to validate one another’s emotions, avoiding cycles of invalidation and escalating emotional reactions. They also develop the same concepts, skills, and language that a young person is learning in DBT treatment, facilitating better understanding and mutual respect.
Family Systems Therapy
Family systems therapy understands families as systems. Within a family system, every family member’s behaviour affects every other person and the family as a whole. Different aspects of family life – such as parenting behaviours, problem-solving, and parents’ mental health – affect family members and their relationships with one another.
There are lots of different kinds of family systems therapy. One of the most common types is structural family systems therapy. Structural family systems therapy aims to help families build relationships with healthy limits and boundaries. As young people grow older and more independent, the boundaries of these relationships need to change and adapt.
Family systems therapy may also focus on finding new solutions to family problems when the strategies families currently use are no longer effective.
Family Art Therapy
Sometimes, concepts and emotions are complex to express with words. Art therapy can provide an alternative mode of communication for family members to understand one another. It can facilitate the expression of memories or topics that may be too painful for someone to verbalise.
Creative outlets may help families to conceptualise different aspects of their relationships that are important to healthy family dynamics. For example, ideas about interpersonal boundaries can be hard to conceptualise verbally. Instead, they may be better understood through pictures or movement.
Family-Centred Support for Young People
Family-centred mental health support emphasises the partnership between parents and the mental health professionals providing treatment. It gives families a decision-making role in their child’s treatment and recognises parents as experts in their child’s needs.
Some key characteristics of family-centred care include:
- Young people and families are supported to participate in treatment planning and make decisions
- Mental health professionals share complete and unbiased information with young people and their families
- Professionals, young people, and families collaborate in the planning and delivery of mental health support
At The Wave, we adopt a family-centred approach to young people’s mental health care that goes beyond family therapy. Following the above principles, we include families in the treatment process from the very start, building organic, personal relationships with parents and other family members.
We also stay connected with families after young people have left The Wave and returned home. We offer advice and additional therapeutic support while connecting families with local services and liaising with schools.
As young people and families from Mexico come to the Wave and return home, a community of families in Mexico has formed. These families have shared experiences, values, and visions for the future. New families who come to The Wave can connect to this community, benefiting from advice, friendship, and support throughout the treatment process and the following years.
Contact Us Today
If you’re interested in finding out more about our programs, get in touch today. We’re here to support you.
