How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 29
Techniques
Family therapy uses a range of counselling and other techniques including:
communication theory
media and communications psychology
psychoeducation
psychotherapy
relationship education
systemic coaching
systems theory
reality therapy
The number of sessions depends on the situation, but the average is 5-20 sessions.
A family therapist usually meets several members of the family at the same time. This has the advantage of
making differences between the ways family members perceive mutual relations as well as interaction patterns
in the session apparent both for the therapist and the family.
These patterns frequently mirror habitual interaction patterns at home, even though the therapist is now
incorporated into the family system.
Therapy interventions usually focus on relationship patterns rather than on analyzing impulses of the
unconscious mind or early childhood trauma of individuals as a Freudian therapist would do - although some
schools of family therapy, for example psychodynamic and intergenerational, do consider such individual and
historical factors (thus embracing both linear and circular causation) and they may use instruments such as the
genogram to help to elucidate the patterns of relationship across generations.
The distinctive feature of family therapy is its perspective and analytical framework rather than the number of
people present at a therapy session. Specifically, family therapists are relational therapists: They are
generally more interested in what goes on between individuals rather than within one or more
individuals, although some family therapists—in particular those who identify as psychodynamic, object
relations, intergenerational, EFT, or experiential family therapists—tend to be as interested in individuals as in
the systems those individuals and their relationships constitute.
Depending on the conflicts at issue and the progress of therapy to date, a therapist may focus on analyzing
specific previous instances of conflict, as by reviewing a past incident and suggesting alternative ways family
members might have responded to one another during it, or instead proceed directly to addressing the sources of
conflict at a more abstract level, as by pointing out patterns of interaction tha