Different therapists may agree on the goal of therapy for a particular family, yet their techniques for reaching it will differ. Each therapist has their own personality and skills, relates to people in their own way, and draws on different techniques and strategies.
In the more than a hundred years since psychology emerged, many methods, techniques, approaches and theories have been developed to resolve clients’ inner and interpersonal problems — from Sigmund Freud’s long-term psychoanalytic treatment to cognitive–behavioural approaches and, more recently, brief and postmodern approaches such as solution-focused therapy. All of these focus on the individual and see change in the individual as their ultimate goal. Since the 1940s, however, a fundamental shift has taken place in the thinking of psychology’s pioneers. From then on, no single family member is singled out as “the patient”; instead, the whole family is seen as reflecting the family’s distress and turmoil.
In this new paradigm it is the family’s interactions and communication system that have the problem, and changing the kind and quality of those interactions can help restore health to the member who shows the symptoms. In other words, family therapy is an intervention that focuses on changing the interactions between family members, and seeks to improve how the family functions as a unit made up of each of its members. Family therapy is a form of group therapy in which the unit of treatment is the family itself: in sessions, one or more therapists work with all of the family (or some of its members), with the aim of resolving or easing the conflicts and anxiety within the family that give rise to illness.
Family therapy approaches and techniques were first used in treating people with schizophrenia. Early analyses saw schizophrenia as a product of the person’s relationship with their mother or caregiver, and specialists tried to restore the person’s health by changing the way the two interacted.
Many kinds of family can benefit from family therapy, including: families with a member who has an addiction, a mental illness, a physical condition, or behavioural or educational difficulties; families after divorce; remarried families; and families facing cultural, developmental or adjustment difficulties.
Prepared by Abbas Mouziri