Family Therapy

The practice of family therapy consists of meetings with all relevant family members. With their permission, the therapy is usually conducted in a team setting, usually with the therapist in a room with the family and with rest of the team offering live supervision, watching from behind a one-way screen in an observation room. To understand family therapy, it is important to understand basic tenets that underlie family functioning. A tool often used by family therapists is a genogram. This visual mapping of a family over time, including at least three generations, enables both clients and therapist to view patterns that otherwise might be overlooked. Family therapy focuses on dynamics and interactions among family members, and such relationships among them are the targets of interventions, watching over opportunities and constraints of the social context of family, as the impact of social contexts and family relationships relate intimately to personal problems.