Family Sytem Theory Essay

Family therapy is a form of counseling which specializes in treating family relationships. Marriage and Family Therapists can work with every combination of family relationship (whole families or couples, parents with children or individual members) to assist a family to function in more comfortable and useful ways. While most family therapists work alone with family members, others may work in pairs or a larger team of therapists. How Does Family Therapy Work? Family systems theory proposes that we as individuals first learn about ourselves, our emotions and how to manage close relationships from the experience we have growing up in our family of origin. This personal experience influences how we tend to function in all other relationships we may have throughout our lives. As we come to better understand ourselves in our family emotional system, and work to heal our natural, anxious reactions to it, we can become more flexible in our marriages, our parenting, and our work and community relationships. What Kinds of Therapy Does Family Therapy Use? While some forms of family therapy are based in cognitive, behavioral, experiential or psychodynamic psychology, the most commonly practiced methods of this therapy are based on family systems theory. Family therapy developed its theoretical foundations fifty years ago from the developing, cross disciplinary body of knowledge called systems theory. Systems theoryproposes that everything we experience in the world is interconnected to its context, and can’t be fully understood without it. When it comes to human beings, then, we don’t know who we are without understanding the relationships we have. Those relationships include the ones we have with family, our friends, our neighborhood and cultures, our work and school environments, and those we may have with the larger systems of language, gender, nationality, or religion. Professional Accreditation and Family Therapy Family Therapy is specific to the graduate training of Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists (LMFT). LMFTs can be found in private, group and clinical therapy practices across the United States and abroad. Other psychological professionals, such as psychologists, social workers, and professional counselors may also have received some advanced training in family system therapy, and may use its principles and ideas in their work. The number of sessions depends on the situation, but the average is 5-20 sessions. A family therapist usually meets several members of the family at the same time. This has the advantage of making differences between the ways family members perceive mutual relations as well as interaction patterns in the session apparent both for the therapist and the family. These patterns frequently mirror habitual interaction patterns at home, even though the therapist is now incorporated into the family system. Therapy interventions usually focus on relationship patterns rather than on analyzing impulses of the unconscious mind or early childhood trauma of individuals as a Freudian therapist would do – although some schools of family therapy, for example psychodynamicand intergenerational, do consider such individual and historical factors (thus embracing both linear and circular causation) and they may use instruments such as the genogram to help to elucidate the patterns of relationship across generations. The distinctive feature of family therapy is its perspective and analytical framework rather than the number of people present at a therapy session. Specifically, family therapists are relational therapists: They are generally more interested in what goes on between individuals rather than within one or more individuals, although some family therapists—in particular those who identify aspsychodynamic, object relations, intergenerational, EFT, or experiential family therapists—tend to be as interested in individuals as in the systems those individuals and their relationships constitute. Depending on the conflicts at issue and the progress of therapy to date, a therapist may focus on analyzing specific previous instances of conflict, as by reviewing a past incident and suggesting alternative ways family members might have responded to one another during it, or instead proceed directly to addressing the sources of conflict at a more abstract level, as by pointing out patterns of interaction that the family might have not noticed. Family therapists tend to be more interested in the maintenance and/or solving of problems rather than in trying to identify a single cause. Some families may perceive cause-effect analyses as attempts to allocate blame to one or more individuals, with the effect that for many families a focus on causation is of little or no clinical utility. It is important to note that a circular way of problem evaluation is used as opposed to a linear route. Using this method, families can be helped by finding patterns of behaviour, what the causes are, and what can be done to better their situation.