Family and couple therapy focuses on changing interactions among people so as to alleviate a client family’s presenting problem. Family therapy is actively focused on problem solving approaches related to improve quality of interactions, reduce burden and improve family functioning.
Although family therapy ideally involves as many family members as possible, family therapy may be conducted with a single client. Whether working with one client, a couple or a family unit, I look at the family system, as well as the community, school, or work systems, to determine ways to help clients improve their lives.
Information from the family will be gathered to represent the family relationships and the history and quality of those relationships. In ongoing sessions, we will understand how the system of interactions in the immediate family and in past generations may contribute to the issues they are presently working on.
At beginning of treatment what is challenging the family or the couple becomes the focus of intervention: naming the problem, goal structuring, role structuring, role reverberations, individual self-care… Engage family members by addressing systematically those processes that family systems must address.
Often, one of the most frustrating thing within a family or a couple relationship is that a person is not responding to “all the things the other/s is/are offering”. What might be happening is that the person is receiving everything but what s/he wants. Therefore, helping to understand each other needs, may help us provide what the other wants in the way the other person wants to receive it.
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