Family life can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re raising children abroad without extended family or built-in support.

Family therapy examines family systems and makes room for new responses.

When family therapy helps

Families often seek therapy when:

• tension is constant

• communication keeps breaking down

• parenting feels misaligned

• children are struggling emotionally or behaviorally

• everyone feels exhausted

• stress from moving or life changes is spilling into family life

If you’re unsure whether family therapy or child therapy makes more sense, we can talk it through.

What family therapy looks like

Family therapy focuses on:

• improving communication

• reducing emotional escalation

• helping children feel safer and more regulated

• supporting parents as a team

• understanding patterns rather than blaming individuals

Sessions may involve parents together, parents alone, or children, depending on what’s most helpful.

Families and expat life

International families often face:

• fewer support systems

• cultural differences around parenting

• language transitions for children

• parental burnout

Family therapy offers a place to slow things down and recalibrate.

You may also want to explore child therapy or couples therapy, depending on where the stress is showing up most.

What is a "family system"?

Bowen’s Family Systems Theory is a way of understanding people not as isolated individuals, but as part of an emotional system shaped by their family relationships over time.

The core idea is simple: when anxiety rises in a family, predictable patterns emerge. Those patterns get passed down unless they are noticed and changed.

Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist, observed families closely and focused less on symptoms and more on how people relate under stress.

Here are the key concepts, in plain language.

Differentiation of self
This is the ability to stay emotionally connected while still thinking and acting for yourself. Low differentiation looks like getting flooded by others’ emotions or cutting off to cope. Higher differentiation looks like staying present, calm, and clear even when relationships are tense. Bowen saw this as central to mental health.

Triangles
When tension builds between two people, a third person often gets pulled in to stabilize things. This might look like a child absorbing parental stress, a partner confiding in someone else, or family members aligning against each other. Triangles reduce anxiety short-term but keep problems stuck.

Nuclear family emotional system
Bowen described common patterns in immediate families under stress. Conflict between partners, emotional distance, symptoms in one person, or focus on a child. These patterns are not random. They are responses to anxiety circulating in the system.

Family projection process
Parents can unintentionally pass their own anxiety onto a child. This often shows up as over-focus, worry, or seeing a child as fragile or problematic. Over time, the child may absorb that anxiety and develop symptoms.

Multigenerational transmission process
Emotional patterns repeat across generations. Levels of anxiety, ways of handling closeness, conflict styles, and roles tend to echo down family lines. Bowen emphasized looking back at least three generations to understand present struggles.

Emotional cutoff
Some people manage family anxiety by distancing themselves emotionally or physically. This can look like minimal contact, politeness without closeness, or geographic distance. Cutoff can reduce tension temporarily, but unresolved patterns often resurface in other relationships.

Sibling position
Birth order can shape tendencies in responsibility, leadership, or dependency, especially when combined with family stress. Bowen saw this as influential but not deterministic.

Societal emotional process
Bowen extended his ideas beyond families, suggesting that societies under stress show similar emotional patterns. Polarization, reactivity, and scapegoating increase when collective anxiety rises.

In practice, Bowenian work focuses less on fixing others and more on helping one person observe patterns, reduce reactivity, and respond more thoughtfully. Small shifts in one person can change the whole system over time.

Next steps

If your home feels tense or disconnected more often than you’d like, family therapy can help.

You can book a free intro call to talk about family therapy in Copenhagen.