Few things wreck havoc with a family like a troubled teen. We’re painfully aware of that here at The Family Foundation School where our entire program focuses on repairing the broken bonds between troubled teens, their parents and siblings.
A critical part of our therapeutic program is family group counseling, which uses a systems approach to deal with family issues and to re-establish the family unit as the psychological and emotional safe haven it’s supposed to be.
Unlike therapy that focuses exclusively on the individual, systems therapy explores ways in which each family member’s experience and behavior affects the others. By observing and interacting with many family members at once, systems therapists receive important clues about a family’s patterns. Who really enforces the rules? Who tends to hold back their opinions? Systems therapists try to draw attention to and, where necessary, change those patterns through role playing, coaching or simply witnessing and giving constructive feedback.
“With one person in the room, you can talk about the system,” says Richard Wampler, a family systems therapist and director of the couple and family therapy doctoral program at Michigan State University, “but it’s more powerful to have the system in the room. That way, you don’t have to hear someone’s report. You can see how the system works.” Read the complete article here.
