Despite the name, family therapy is not just a therapy that is done with families. “Family” suggests the relational dynamic present in the lives of individuals, groups, societies, etc. So family therapy is more of a theoretical/clinical orientation that can be applied to various modalities.

Today family therapy as a field offers many theoretical orientations each of which have its own language and understanding of how systems work, how they produce pathology as well as well-being. But how did it all begin?

It began with people from multi-disciplinary fields looking into systems and their parts. We have cybernetics and general systems theory that paved the way for us to adopt a more systemic way to look at the world and see its parts independently as well as interdependently to make a better sense of it. Later we have had psychiatrists who have done work with schizophrenic patients and their families. Once the relationship between an individual patient’s symptoms and the family environment was understood, more solid steps towards family therapy were taken. Going from group therapy to conjoint therapy and finally to family therapy, the field established itself having gotten great results from its respective applications in the field of mental health.

Today, family therapy continues to be recognized as an efficient method of intervention for plethora of disorders from depression and anxiety to eating disorders, from trauma to bipolar disorder and mostly obviously from partner relational issues to disorders involving children and adolescents.