Clinicians who work with families will find in this book a rigorous and creative approach to interviewing and intervention.
While pointing to the essential creativity of the therapeutic enterprise, the book presents a structured approach to working with families. Each chapter focuses on one part of the family-therapy process, from first session to last. Core practices - engagement, the questioning process, the use of the self in therapy, establishing parental hierarchy, establishing safety while building the therapeutic relationship, dealing with breached relationships, couple sessions, family-of-origin sessions, and working with adolescents, smaller children, and the wider system – are emphasised. Therapeutic interactions and case studies are a feature.
Paul Rhodes and Andrew Wallis have brought together a group of authors who share their commitment to innovative and contextual practice, grounded in systemic family therapy, but drawing on a variety of other models, including structural family therapy, brief solution-focused therapy, and narrative therapy.
Experienced clinicians - from social work, counselling, psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and other disciplines – who do not see themselves as family therapists, but who work with families and wish to develop their interviewing and intervention skills, will find the book helpful. Beginning therapists, facing a challenging learning process, will benefit from the structured approach. |
