FAMILY THERAPY

Strangely, although Nick has been active in AFT UK for 30 years, and has been working as an official Family Therapist for a decade (since 2003), it is only now (late 2012) that he notices there is no Menu heading on Forallthat for "Family Therapy". So here it is. There is lots to put onto this section too.

Starting with his key recent challenge to the field of Family Therapy to "spread its wings" from its more narrow base in the NHS mostly into the non-statutory sector and (revive) its efforts with encouraging good systemic practice in other professions too. It was published in Context in February 2012. It was the energising force behind the relaunch of the AFT network for those in the non-statutory sector. Nick has not had the spare energy or ideas about how to achieve the "systemic practice" re-launch - in fact, "systemic practice" has probably more commonly come to mean several other things than it originally did in AFT (see here for more of the meanings of systemic). 

Where Family Therapy has rapidly flourished and grown over the last 50 years, naturally there is a rich and possibly confusing array of approaches and ideas to be found in that field. Sometimes that natural confusion can become mystifying as approaches and people argue about their own theories, philosophies and methods often using jargon that has only limited meaning to outsiders. Sometimes it is a straightforward competition about being "more systemic than thou" even though "systemic" has not been defined anyway!

But the requirements of research have created useful demystified descriptions of what Family Therapy looks like in practice. Click here for the Leeds Family Therapy and Research Centre's "Manual of Systemic and Family Therapy".

Systemic Means Much More .. in the community and for other professions
      (or find a pdf version of this paper here).