Family Therapy

Family therapy involves the participation of one or more members of the same family who seek help for troubled family relationships or the problems of individual or family members. Typical problems that bring families into family therapy are delinquent behavior by a child or adolescent, a child’s poor performance in school, hostilities between a parent and child or between siblings and severe psychological disturbance or mental illness in a parent or a child.

One of the most influential forms of family therapy, family systems therapy, views the family as single, complex system or unit. Individual member are interdependent parts of the system. Rather than treating one person’s symptoms in isolation, therapist try to understand the symptoms in isolation, therapists try to understand the symptoms in the larger context of the family. For example, a boy who begins picking fights with classmates might do so to get more attention from his busy parents. Therapists are working from rationale that current family relationships profoundly affected and are affected by individual family member’s psychological problem. For this reason, most family therapist prefers to work with the entire family during sessions rather than meeting with family members. Instead the therapist makes suggestions about how family members might adjust their roles and prevent future conflict.

In most family therapy sessions, the therapist encourages family members to air their feelings, frustrations, and hostilities. By observing how they interact the therapist can help them recognize their roles and relationships with each other. The therapist trees to avoid assigning blame to any particular