Family & Couples Therapy

Family and couples therapy at Rahama Wellness Center brings the people who live with a problem into the room where it is worked on. Sessions are held at our centre in Sabon Lugbe, Abuja, and are led by a counsellor trained in systemic family therapy, which treats the pattern between people as the thing being treated rather than treating one person as the one at fault.

When a family needs the room rather than one person

Some difficulties belong to a household rather than to an individual. A parent and an adolescent who have stopped being able to talk. A marriage carrying something nobody has said out loud. A family reorganising itself around a relative's mental illness or addiction. In each of those, treating one person alone leaves them going home to the same pattern every week, which is the argument for bringing everybody in.

How sessions are run

Everyone in the room gets heard, including the person who has been talked about rather than talked to. The counsellor sets the ground rules at the start, keeps the session from becoming the argument the family already knows how to have, and works on what each person can change rather than on who was right. Multi-generational households are ordinary here, and so are the obligations that come with them: nobody is asked to choose between getting better and their family.

Families of clients in treatment

Where one member of the family is already in treatment, this runs alongside their own care with their consent, not instead of it. That applies whether they are attending individual therapy or one of our specialised therapy programmes. Where the issue sits between two partners rather than across a household, marital and relationship counselling is usually the better fit. Families travel to us from Lugbe, Gwarinpa, Wuse, Maitama, Asokoro, Garki and Kubwa.