What is Family Therapy?

Family therapists treat a wide variety of psychological, emotional, and relational problems, including depression, anxiety, marital distress, childhood and adolescent difficulties, parenting issues, blended family concerns, work problems, and so on.  The hallmark of family therapy is not the types of problems we help people solve, but our approach to working with individuals, couples, and families.

Marriage and family therapists share the premise that human behavior occurs within specific social, cultural, and family contexts and is influenced by those contexts. Family therapists understand individual and family behavior as the outcome of a series of interrelated patterns of thought, feeling and action that occur within specific internal and external environments.  They further view individual, family and contextual factors as influencing one another in reciprocal fashion.

Specific relationship patterns, behavioral problems, and psychological symptoms are understood by family therapists to be shaped by a complex multiplicity of cultural, social, familial, individual psychological, physiological and genetic factors, each interacting with the other to shape the behavior and experience of individuals and of family systems.

For family therapists, change can be initiated at multiple points within the client system and/or environmental systems which surround the family.  While the family system itself is the point of intervention unique to family therapists, the field includes an emphasis on individuals, couples, and the larger culture.  Importance is placed on understanding how race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, abilities, language, country of origin, and other socially located identities intersect to maintain systems of power and privilege.  Family therapists are interested in how these contextual factors influence the lives of individuals and families and in intervening in larger social forces that maintain individual and family problems.

The Human Development & Family Studies Marriage and Family Therapy program Standard Curriculum is intended to fulfill the educational requirements for clinical membership in the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (www.aamft.org) and for MFT licensing by the State of Connecticut.