About Family Therapy
Family Therapy, also referred to as Couple and Family Therapy and Family Systems Therapy, is a branch of psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of interaction between family members.
It emphasises family relationships as an important factor in psychological health. What the different schools of family therapy have in common is a belief that, regardless of the origin of the problem, and regardless of whether the clients consider it an “individual” or “family” issue, involving families in solutions is often beneficial. In the field’s early years, many clinicians defined the family in a narrow, traditional manner usually including parents and children. As the field has evolved, the concept of the family is more commonly defined in terms of strongly supportive, long-term roles and relationships between people who may or may not be related by blood or marriage. Family therapy has been used effectively in the full range of human dilemmas, including organizational dynamics. Brett Williams Family Therapy applies the “systems” approach to all work undertaken at this practice and believes the definition, above, drawn from Wikipedia, provides a succinct overview of this approach.
