The whole point of family therapy is for people to heal together and move forward, but that’s often not the main goal of everyone who attends.

Sometimes, people want to use the therapy session to air out their feelings in a professional setting, without feeling obligated to spare anyone else’s feelings. They don’t want the situation to get better, and they are not interested in repairing their relationship with anyone there; they simply want to say their piece and leave.

That is basically what the 22-year-old sister below is looking for when she agreed to attend family therapy with her 16-year-old brother and their grandparents. She doesn’t care about working on her broken relationship with them or moving past their issues; she wants to use the setting to air out everything «wrong» with her brother and leave.

When the two were just young kids, a 9-year-old and a 3-year-old, their father decided to leave and never return. The 9-year-old daughter decided to blame her clueless 3-year-old brother for their father leaving, and she still blames him 13 years later. For his entire childhood, he had to listen to his big sister’s complaints about his entire existence, until their mother had had enough and demanded she move out when she was 18 years old.

Since then, the family has not been reunited until the grandparents decided it was time to try family therapy together. After refusing to give it a try, the sister decided to say yes, which the grandparents took as a good sign that the sister is finally ready to repair her relationship with her younger brother.

However, it has now become crystal clear that the only reason the sister said yes to family therapy is so that she would have a professional setting while she vents at her brother, as she has done for most of their lives. When the brother found that out, he became the one refusing family therapy, which is again causing distress to the entire family.

Can family therapy actually save this broken family?