Family and Relationship Struggles

Families change shape. A child becomes a teenager, a teenager becomes their own person, an adult child gets married, parents get older. None of it happens smoothly, and none of it means anything has gone wrong.

Most of what brings people to me here isn't crisis. It's the ordinary, exhausting friction of people who love each other growing in different directions at the same time.

When a young person starts becoming their own person

From around sixteen, most young people begin genuinely separating from their parents — forming their own views, their own friendships, their own sense of who they are. Pushing back is part of that, not a symptom of it going wrong.

Some experimenting with alcohol, cannabis or vaping often comes with it — naming that is not an endorsement of any of it, only a description of what, in my experience, this stage often includes. That is not the same as addiction, and it doesn't need to be treated as one.

If drinking, drugs or other behaviour has become a serious worry rather than ordinary experimenting, there is more on the Help for Youth at Risk page.

Trust, privacy, and the methods that backfire

Parents often try to manage this stretch with checking: phones, emails, location tracking. It nearly always comes from love, and from real fear. But care and control can look identical from the outside, and sometimes what feels like caring, to the parent doing it, is experienced as controlling by the child on the other end of it. It just as often does the opposite of what it's meant to.

“My parents don't trust me. They look at my phone and my emails. They track my location.” That is what it looks like from the other side — an invasion of privacy and control, however well-meant, and it tends to alienate exactly the child it's trying to protect.

The methods parents reach for aren't usually ineffective because the parents are doing something wrong. They're ineffective because control was never going to work on a person who is, developmentally, supposed to be pulling away right now.

Still being someone's child, as an adult

This doesn't end at eighteen. Plenty of the adults I see are still, in real ways, under a parent's influence — carrying guilt for holding a different view, caught between contemporary values and a more conservative upbringing, watching a parent's opinion quietly shape decisions in their own marriage.

Family of origin doesn't stay in the family of origin. It follows people into their own homes and their own relationships, and it can cause real friction with a partner who is, understandably, trying to work out where their in-laws' influence ends and their marriage begins.

Part of this work is drawing a clear separation between your family of origin, the one you grew up in, and your own core family, the one you are now building. Both matter. But the second one needs room of its own to exist.

Learning to assert yourself here, without the guilt, is a large part of this work.

Love and anger can coexist

When individual expression isn't allowed

Some families, without meaning to, don't leave room for anyone in them to be authentically different. Everyone plays a part, everyone keeps the peace, and nobody quite gets to be themselves.

Children raised this way often grow into adults who don't know who they are, who doubt themselves constantly, and who find it hard to trust their own judgement when it's time to make a real decision about their own life. More on that on the self-esteem and identity page, which this overlaps closely.

I know this one first-hand as well as professionally. I am married, and have raised three children through school, university and into their mid-to-late twenties, alongside years of working with families in clinics and in private practice. I have seen, in my own family of origin and in others', what it costs a family when everyone quietly pretends things are fine, and they aren't.

Parenting together, disagreeing well

Raising children rarely happens without disagreement between the parents doing it — about discipline, about values, about how much freedom is right at what age. Add financial pressure and the ordinary strain of work, and the friction multiplies.

Disagreeing about how to raise your children doesn't mean you're doing it badly. It usually means you both care enough to have a view.

How I work with this

Mostly with individuals. I don't do couples counselling as a rule, though if a client asks me to see their partner alongside them for a session, I will, by agreement and as part of their own work.

The same applies to a parent and an adult child: where it would help, and depending on what the people involved actually need, we can bring them into the same room. It is never the default, and it is never without agreement from everyone in it.

Where this often overlaps

Family friction rarely stays in one lane. It touches self-worth, self-esteem and identity directly, it's often what's underneath a younger person's struggles (help for youth at risk, for real risk and crisis rather than ordinary growing up), and where a marriage is genuinely ending rather than simply under strain, there's more on divorce and separation.

Practical details

Sessions are fifty minutes, in person at my practice in Stellenbosch or online by Zoom, in English or Afrikaans. Fees and other practical questions are answered on the FAQ page.

Getting in touch

Send me a message by email, WhatsApp or the contact form. You don't need a crisis to justify writing. “Things are just difficult at home right now” is reason enough.

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