Family Counselling · Canberra & Online
When something is affecting one person, it can begin to affect the whole family.
Families often seek counselling when something has become difficult to manage together. There may be escalating conflict between a parent and child, an adolescent withdrawing, tension between siblings, difficulties adjusting to change, or one family member experiencing distress that is affecting relationships across the household.
Sometimes the difficulty seems to centre around one person. Their experience matters in its own right — and family counselling does not assume that the family caused it or that the individual is simply carrying a problem that belongs to everyone else.
At the same time, when one person is struggling, the people around them naturally respond. Parents may become more worried or protective. Conflict may increase. Family members may withdraw, take sides, try harder to help, or become unsure what to do. Over time, these responses can develop into patterns that make an already difficult situation harder for everyone to navigate.
Other families come because the difficulty is more clearly between people — recurring conflict, strained parent-child relationships, sibling difficulties, changes in family roles, cultural or intergenerational tensions, or a significant transition affecting the family as a whol
Family counselling looks at both: what individual family members are experiencing and what is happening between them. The aim is not to locate the problem in one person or in the family itself, but to understand what is happening well enough to help the family respond differently.
You may recognise some of this
Something has become difficult — and the effects are being felt across the family.
One person’s wellbeing or behaviour has become the focus of a great deal of worry, attention, or conflict within the family.
The same arguments keep returning, even when everyone has tried to handle things differently.
A parent and child seem increasingly caught in conflict, distance, or misunderstanding.
One parent feels like they are carrying most of the emotional or practical responsibility while the other has become less involved.
Family members have started taking sides, avoiding one another, or becoming caught between other people’s conflicts.
There are important things that have become difficult to talk about openly.
A change — illness, bereavement, migration, adolescence, a blended family, or another transition — has unsettled how the family previously functioned.
One person is receiving individual support, but the family is still unsure how to respond to what they are experiencing.
Ordinary moments — meals, school mornings, weekends, family gatherings — have begun carrying tension that is difficult to understand or shift.
Family counselling can be useful when a difficulty is affecting relationships across the family, when the way family members respond to one another has become part of what needs attention, or when something happening between people has become difficult to resolve from inside the family itself.
The starting point is not an assumption that one person is the problem — or that the family is. It is understanding what each person is experiencing and what is happening between them.
Patterns that can develop in families
When families are under pressure, ways of responding can become organised and difficult to shift.
Families are made up of relationships that continually affect one another. When one person is struggling, other family members naturally respond. When conflict develops between two people, others may become involved. When circumstances change, roles that once worked may become harder to sustain.
Over time, some of these responses can develop into recurring patterns. They are not necessarily the cause of the original difficulty, and they are rarely deliberate. Often they represent people’s attempts to care, protect, cope, reduce conflict, or keep family life functioning.
Different families develop different patterns. Some that can become relevant in family counselling include:
Pattern 01
One person becomes the focus.
A great deal of the family’s attention becomes organised around one person’s difficulty.
A child may be anxious or refusing school. An adolescent may be withdrawing or becoming increasingly angry. A parent may be struggling emotionally. Their difficulty is real and may require support in its own right.
At the same time, the family’s responses can become increasingly organised around it — monitoring, worrying, arguing, rescuing, withdrawing, accommodating, or disagreeing about what should happen.
Family counselling can explore both what the person is experiencing and what has developed around that experience, without assuming that either the individual or the family is the cause of the problem.
Pattern 02
Relationships become organised into sides.
When tension rises, some relationships may become closer while others become more distant.
A child may increasingly turn to one parent while avoiding another. One parent may feel caught between their partner and a child. Siblings may take different positions during family conflict.
These alignments are not necessarily deliberate or unhealthy in themselves. But when they become rigid, they can make direct communication more difficult and leave some family members feeling caught, excluded, or responsible for tensions that do not belong entirely to them.
The work can help make these patterns more visible and support more direct and flexible relationships between family members.
Pattern 03
Roles become uneven or fixed.
One person may begin carrying more while another carries less.
In some families, one person becomes responsible for keeping everything functioning — organising, worrying, anticipating problems, managing emotions, or stepping in whenever something goes wrong.
Another family member may become increasingly dependent, disengaged, or less involved.
Sometimes these arrangements are necessary, particularly during illness, crisis, developmental change, or periods of significant stress. Difficulties can arise when temporary adaptations become fixed roles that no longer fit the family or the people within it.
Family counselling can explore how responsibility is currently distributed and whether different ways of relating or sharing responsibility have become possible.
Pattern 04
Some conversations become difficult to have directly.
Important experiences can begin appearing indirectly in other interactions.
Families sometimes avoid particular subjects because previous attempts to discuss them have led to conflict, hurt, worry, or shutdown.
Over time, tension may appear elsewhere — through repeated arguments, withdrawal, irritability, misunderstandings, or conflict between other family members.
Family counselling can create space to understand what has become difficult to talk about, why it has become difficult, and whether those conversations can happen differently.
These patterns are possibilities, not assumptions. Some families will recognise several of them; others will not. The purpose of family counselling is to understand the particular relationships, experiences, and circumstances within your family — including what is working, not only what has become difficult.
The question is not who is the problem. It is what each person is experiencing, what is happening between them, and what has become difficult for the family to shift together.
WHERE CHANGE BEGINS
Everyone needs enough space to participate.
Family counselling brings people into the same room who may have very different experiences of the same situation — and different levels of power, responsibility, and freedom to speak openly.
This is particularly important when children or young people are involved. A child may experience a family situation very differently from a parent but find it difficult to say so. A parent may be carrying responsibilities or concerns that a child cannot fully see. One family member may speak readily while another becomes quiet, overwhelmed, or unsure how to participate.
The aim is not to make everyone equally responsible for what is happening. Parents and caregivers retain responsibilities that children do not, and differences in age, development, authority, and dependence matter.
Instead, the work aims to create enough structure for each person’s experience to be heard and taken seriously, while remaining attentive to how family members affect one another in the room.
Sometimes that means slowing a conversation down. Sometimes I may speak with different family members separately or work with a smaller part of the family. Sometimes the most useful work is with parents or caregivers rather than asking a child to carry the responsibility for change.
Where there are concerns about violence, coercion, abuse, intimidation, or other circumstances that could make joint participation unsafe, these need to be considered before proceeding with standard family sessions.
Family counselling does not require everyone to have equal responsibility. It requires everyone’s experience to matter.
Children and young people
The young person matters — and so do the relationships around them.
When a child or young person is struggling, it can be tempting to ask whether the difficulty belongs to the young person or to the family.
Family counselling does not need to choose between those explanations.
A child or young person may be experiencing anxiety, low mood, behavioural difficulties, school-related concerns, grief, trauma, developmental challenges, relationship difficulties, or the effects of a significant change. Those experiences deserve to be understood in their own right.
At the same time, children and young people develop within relationships. How parents and caregivers understand what is happening, how family members respond, what happens during difficult moments, and whether the young person can reach the people around them for support can all become relevant.
Sometimes family members become caught in understandable attempts to help. A parent may become increasingly worried and protective. Another may respond by becoming firmer. Conflict may escalate around school, routines, behaviour, devices, friendships, or independence. The young person may withdraw further, and everyone can become increasingly unsure what will help.
Family counselling can work with these interactions without assuming that the family caused the young person’s difficulty.
Parents and caregivers can be part of the resource
Depending on the young person’s age, circumstances, and what brings the family to counselling, some of the most useful work may involve parents or caregivers.
This can include helping them understand what the young person may be experiencing, recognising patterns that develop during difficult moments, strengthening connection, responding differently to distress or conflict, and finding ways of providing both support and appropriate boundaries.
The aim is not to turn parents into therapists. It is to strengthen their capacity to be a reliable relational resource for the young person while also recognising the pressures they themselves may be carrying.
The young person should not carry the responsibility for changing the family
Where family relationships are part of the difficulty, change should not depend on a child becoming more articulate, more compliant, less emotional, or better able to manage the adults around them.
Adults retain adult responsibilities.
Family counselling considers what can change around the young person as well as what support the young person themselves may need.
A child can need support in their own right while the relationships around them can also become part of the support.
Adult families
Family relationships continue to matter long after childhood.
Family counselling is not only for parents and children living in the same household. It can also involve adult children and parents, siblings, and other significant family relationships.
Adult families may seek counselling around recurring conflict, emotional distance, unresolved hurt, changing roles, caregiving responsibilities, boundaries, or different expectations about family, independence, and obligation. Culture, migration, marriage, parenting, ageing, illness, and loss can also change how family members relate to one another.
The work creates space to understand each person’s experience, what has become difficult between family members, and whether a different way of relating is possible.
The aim is not always greater closeness. Sometimes it is repair; sometimes clearer boundaries, greater understanding, or a more workable relationship.
The context
Every person in a family has a context.
Family members do not arrive in their relationships with the same experiences, expectations, or understanding of the world. Each person has developed within a particular family, community, culture, generation, and period of time — and those contexts shape how they understand themselves and one another.
Parents bring their own histories of being parented. What they received, what was missing, what was expected of them, how emotions were handled, what support was available, and what family life meant in the world they grew up in can all influence how they approach parenting and relationships today.
Children and young people are developing within their own context. Their experiences are shaped not only by their family, but also by school, friendships, community, technology, social expectations, and a world that may hold very different ideas about identity, independence, relationships, emotional wellbeing, and support.
This means two generations can experience the same family very differently. A parent may be working hard to provide something they never received, or trying not to repeat aspects of their own upbringing. A child may experience those efforts differently because they are growing up with different needs, expectations, opportunities, and ways of understanding family relationships.
Migration and cultural change can make these differences even more visible. Parents and children may be growing and adapting within different cultural environments, while ideas about family responsibility, independence, achievement, emotional expression, loyalty, and support continue to change around them.
Family counselling makes room for these different contexts. The purpose is not to decide whose perspective is more valid, but to understand each person in the world that shaped them — and the family relationships developing between those different worlds.
The approach
Working with the people, the relationships, and the family as a whole.
Family counselling here draws primarily on family systems thinking, attachment theory, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), relational psychotherapy, and trauma-informed practice.
The work considers what individual family members are experiencing alongside what happens between them. Depending on what brings a family to counselling, attention may move between individual experience, particular relationships, patterns across the family, and the wider circumstances affecting everyone involved.
Understanding what is happening is important, but insight alone does not always change what happens during difficult moments. When useful, the work also attends to interactions as they unfold in the room — slowing them down, making space for experiences that may be difficult to express, and creating opportunities for family members to understand and respond to one another differently.
The approach is systemic without assuming that every difficulty is caused or maintained by the family system.
Prakash K C is a PACFA Clinical Counsellor working with families in person in Canberra and online across Australia.
The lens
Each person matters. What happens between people matters too.
A family can be understood at several levels at once. One person may be experiencing a difficulty that deserves attention in its own right, while the relationships around them may also influence how that difficulty is experienced, responded to, or supported.
The work remains curious about family roles, attachment relationships, patterns of closeness and distance, boundaries, communication, responsibilities, strengths, and recurring interactions — without assuming that these explain everything.
The aim is not to relocate the problem from one person to the family. It is to widen the frame enough to understand what matters.
The sessions
What happens between family members can become part of the work.
Sessions may involve talking about what has been happening, understanding each person’s perspective, and exploring relevant history or context. They may also involve paying close attention to what happens between family members in the room.
When a familiar interaction appears, we can slow it down and understand it more closely — what happened, what each person experienced, how others responded, and what made the interaction difficult to shift.
Where appropriate, this creates an opportunity not only to understand a familiar pattern, but to experience a different interaction while the people involved are together.
Format
Who attends depends on what the work requires.
Family counselling does not require every family member to attend every session.
Some sessions may involve the whole family. Others may involve parents or caregivers together, a parent and child, siblings, adult family members, or another combination relevant to the work.
Who attends can change over the course of counselling depending on what is happening, the age and needs of family members, safety and clinical considerations, and what would be most useful at that stage.
Common reasons families seek counselling
Families come to counselling for many different reasons.
Families in Canberra and online across Australia may seek counselling for:
Parent-child conflict that keeps escalating
A child or teenager becoming increasingly withdrawn or difficult to reach
School refusal or school-related anxiety affecting family life
Sibling conflict that has become difficult to manage
Tension within blended or stepfamilies
Difficulty adjusting after separation, illness, bereavement, or another significant change
Parenting differences that are creating tension within the family
One family member experiencing distress that is affecting relationships across the family
Roles or responsibilities within the family becoming difficult or unbalanced
Cultural or intergenerational differences between family members
Migration, bicultural identity, or changing expectations about family life
Conflict or distance between adult children and parents
Difficulties between adult siblings
Caregiving, ageing parents, or changing roles across generations
Unresolved hurt or experiences that continue to affect family relationships
These difficulties do not all have the same cause. Sometimes a recurring family interaction has become an important part of what is happening. Sometimes the family is responding to a difficulty primarily experienced by one person. Sometimes a transition, loss, cultural difference, or circumstance outside the family has placed relationships under pressure. Often several things are happening at once.
Family counselling begins by understanding what each person is experiencing, what is happening between family members, and the contexts that may be relevant — rather than deciding in advance where the problem lies.
Is family counselling the right starting point?
Family counselling may be useful when
Conflict, distance, or tension between family members keeps recurring despite attempts to address it.
Something affecting one family member is also having an impact on relationships across the family.
Parents or caregivers are unsure how best to respond to a child or young person who is struggling.
Family members have become caught in roles or ways of responding to one another that are difficult to shift.
The family is navigating a significant transition — such as migration, blended-family formation, illness, bereavement, adolescence, children becoming adults, or another significant change.
Cultural, generational, or intergenerational differences are creating tension or misunderstanding.
Adult family members want to address conflict, distance, unresolved hurt, boundaries, caregiving, or changing family relationships.
The difficulty seems to involve both what individual family members are experiencing and what is happening between them.
Your family wants to strengthen relationships or address difficulties before they become more established.
When a different starting point may be needed
Family counselling is not always the safest or most useful first step. A different approach may be needed where:
There is current violence, abuse, coercive control, intimidation, or fear that could make joint participation unsafe.
Acute mental health, substance-use, or other safety concerns require more immediate or specialised assessment or support.
A child or young person’s needs require individual, developmental, medical, psychological, or other specialist assessment or support beyond the scope of family counselling.
The primary concern involves post-separation parenting, parenting arrangements, family dispute resolution, mediation, family-law proceedings, or court-related assessment or reporting.
Moksha Relational Therapy does not provide family law counselling, post-separation counselling, mediation, family dispute resolution, parenting coordination, or court-related assessment or reports.
The proposed family configuration would make it difficult for someone to participate safely or meaningfully.
Suitability, including who should attend, can be considered during the initial conversation and early sessions. Where family counselling is not the most appropriate starting point, I will discuss this with you and, where possible, help identify other options.
Client experiences
What people say about working with Prakash
“I would highly recommend Prakash. He was amazing at creating a safe, supportive and non-judgemental space. He is very genuine and helped immensely. I couldn’t speak more highly of him.”
— D B · Google Review
Questions
Questions about family counselling.
Not every family member needs to attend every session. Depending on what brings the family to counselling, sessions may involve the whole family, parents or caregivers, a parent and child, siblings, adult family members, or another combination. Who attends can change as the work develops.
The first session is an opportunity to understand what has brought the family to counselling, hear the different perspectives involved, and begin considering what may be useful to focus on.
Family members often understand the same situation differently. The aim is not to decide immediately whose account is correct, but to understand what each person is experiencing and what is happening between them.
Sometimes one person’s distress, behaviour, or circumstances have become the main concern for the family. Their experience deserves to be understood in its own right.
Family counselling can also explore how other family members are responding, what is happening in the relationships around the difficulty, and whether changes within those relationships could provide additional support.
The aim is not to assume either that one person is the problem or that the family caused the difficulty.
Not necessarily. Whether a child or young person participates depends on their age, developmental needs, what is happening, their willingness to participate, and the purpose of the counselling.
Sometimes working with parents or caregivers first — or for part of the counselling — may be more useful than requiring the young person to attend.
I would not want a child or young person to feel that family counselling is something being done to them because adults have decided they are the problem.
Depending on the circumstances, we may begin with parents or caregivers and consider whether involving the young person later would be useful and appropriate. Their willingness, developmental stage, and experience of the situation matter.
No. Children and young people vary considerably in how comfortable they are speaking in front of family members.
I will not expect a young person to explain the family, disclose something before they are ready, or carry responsibility for resolving difficulties between adults. Sessions are structured with attention to age, development, relationships, power differences, and emotional safety.
Yes. Family counselling is not limited to families with dependent children.
It can involve adult children and parents, siblings, or other significant family relationships where people want to work on conflict, distance, unresolved hurt, boundaries, changing roles, intergenerational differences, or another difficulty affecting the relationship.
Not everyone needs to be ready or willing to participate at the same time. In some situations, useful work may still be possible with the family members who are willing to attend.
Whether this should be considered family counselling, individual counselling, or another form of support will depend on who is participating and what they want help with.
Sometimes. Family counselling may involve different combinations of family members at different stages of the work.
There may be times when meeting with parents or caregivers, a particular relationship within the family, or an individual family member is clinically useful. How these sessions are used, including relevant confidentiality boundaries, will be discussed as part of the counselling process.
There is no fixed number of sessions that is right for every family. Frequency and duration depend on what has brought the family to counselling, who is involved, the complexity of the circumstances, and how the work develops.
Regular sessions can be useful initially, with frequency and progress reviewed as counselling continues.
Related services
Sometimes another form of counselling is the better fit.
If the difficulty is primarily being experienced by one person, individual counselling may be a more appropriate starting point.
Where the central difficulty is within the relationship between partners, couples counselling may provide a more focused setting for that work.
If a couple is uncertain about whether to remain together and needs clarity about the future of the relationship, discernment counselling offers a separate, structured process.
Begin
You do not need to know who should attend before getting in touch.
Every family is different. You may already know who wants to participate, or you may be unsure whether the first session should involve the whole family, parents or caregivers, a parent and child, siblings, or another combination.
The first conversation can help clarify what is happening, who may be useful to involve, and whether family counselling is an appropriate starting point.
Practice details
- 50-minute sessions
- $210 per session (free 15-minute initial consultation available)
- Format: Whole family or different combinations of family members, depending on the needs of the work.
- In-person · Belconnen, Canberra ACT
- Online · Across Australia
- info@nowmoksha.com.au