In therapy, when healing also needs other people

Anyone starting psychotherapy usually expects to talk about it alone with their therapist. Sometimes, though, the therapist asks to involve a parent, a partner or a sibling. The request can be surprising or uncomfortable, but it stems from a precise principle of family therapy: personal problems do not arise in a vacuum, they take shape within relationships.

We live in a culture that pushes us to see distress as a private matter, to be faced and solved alone. This belief leads us to think that healing, too, must happen in solitude. Family therapy offers a different perspective: involving someone close to us can help us better understand our own difficulties, because emotions and symptoms are intertwined with family history and the surrounding environment.

The suffering of two siblings raised by the same parents is often similar, even when it shows up in opposite ways. In other cases, a person's distress is rooted in events from their parents' lives, even before they were born. Recognising this is not always easy, especially when someone sees, in a parent, traits they would rather not have themselves.

Not a courtroom

The most common fear is that the session turns into a trial, with everyone's weaknesses used as weapons against each other. For this reason, involving family members should be understood differently: not as a search for someone to blame, but as a tool for mutual understanding.

The Italian word intruso (intruder) comes from the verb intrudere, meaning to force one's way in. But the person involved stops being an intruder the moment they are welcomed rather than pushed away. Often, that person carries a suffering similar to one's own, rooted in the same family history.

Relying on a therapist who works alone with a single patient is, in this view, like a surgeon operating on one organ without considering how it works together with the rest of the body: the risk is treating an isolated symptom without understanding its cause. Welcoming a parent, a partner or a sibling into therapy does not mean giving up on addressing one's own individual distress, but giving the therapist a fuller picture of what is happening.