This one is a little tough to summarize because it's a very general and complicated premise upon which basically all marriage and family therapy is built, but I'll try anyway. So family therapy used to be all about identifying the specific person in the family who was supposedly causing the dysfunction and working on them to fix the problem.
Now we look at the family as a system. This means we focus more on the relationship between the members of the family more than on the members themselves. Different family members will react differently, of course, but now we know that if something happens to the family or within the family, everyone is affected.
There are many different specific sub-theories within the framework of the "family systems theory". Some therapists believe in focusing mostly on our families of origin (our parents and siblings), others subscribe to changing specific behaviors before working on past problems, and still others believe that if we could just clarify and strengthen our boundaries and family structures, we'd be able to return to healthy functioning.
The main take-away here is that there's no way to really know what specifically causes certain dysfunctions in families, but we can at least be aware of the fact that no one is exempt from being affected by trauma in the family.
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