Definition of family therapy - What it is, Meaning and Concept

In order to raise an understandable idea of ​​the concept, we must first define the two terms that make it up: therapy and family.

Therapy is a treatment that attempts to access the essentials of something.In medicine , it is associated with methods that seek to alleviate or cure diseases .And the adjective family is received by all concepts related to the family , the group of people linked by kinship.

Yes uniting both definitions, we can come to understand that family therapy is a method of treatment that attempts to resolve conflicts or situations that a family group is going through; it serves for its members to express their feelings about that problem and try to reach an agreement, understanding and approaching the reality of the rest.

There is a branch of psychotherapy that seeks to provide assistance to these families to improve their well-being and minimize conflict situations.It consists in establishing a communicative process between the psychotherapist and his patients, to achieve change in attitude and behavior.

Objectives of family therapy

According to the conflict that must be treated, at the age of the family members and the degree of hostility that the therapist perceives in the patients, they must opt ​​for one or another technique to approach them.Their role should always be that of mediator; You should never put yourself in the place of any of the members, and you must maintain an objective vision of the conflict, in order to help and not generate more complications in the relationships of your patients.

If the conflict to be focused on intimate relationships, there is talk of marriage therapy or couple therapy ; In this case, the therapist must opt ​​for a critical position of both positions and mark those attitudes that each of the people who make up the couple have and that are possible causes of coexistence problems or that significantly affect the relationship.

It is important to mention that one of the main objectives of family therapy is to turn the destructive criticisms that manifest within the family environment into something constructive, which allows the group to reach a new stage.This type of treatment takes the family as a system with multiple interrelations among its components.If a member presents a problem, its consequences affect the rest.

In those cases in which hostility between two or more members It is very acute, the therapist will advise that patients be treated in separate sessions, in addition to together, in order to delve into the individual conflicts that lead each to behave in a certain way in front of the other.This means that the Family therapy sessions do not necessarily include all members of the group.The decision will depend on the professional and the needs of the family.

It is worth mentioning that one of the most frequent techniques of family therapy is known as genogram .This is to develop a family scheme that allows to represent up to three generations of it, so that your evaluation be more precise.The structure of the family tree and the relationships that exist or have existed between the different relatives are included in the genograms.To do this, the therapist requires the collaboration of patients, their opening, as it is the only way to achieve a result that allows you to work on the conflict that is being treated in therapy.

Finally, it is important to remember that this type of therapy is extremely efficient in solving all kinds of problems; individuals usually manifest difficulties in their relationship with the world because of having developed conflicting dynamics with their family members.If the therapist manages to get to the bottom of the matter, that person may begin to live in a much healthier way and can solve their way of interacting with the environment, from analyzing their family ties.