ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of five of the most prominent family therapy approaches available, breaking them down into Strategic, Systemic, and Postmodern approaches. Strategic Family Therapy showcased how the therapist is responsible for changing a family by developing directives intended to change problematic sequences. The Milan Systemic approach focuses on how a therapist utilizes guidelines such as hypothesizing, circularity, and neutrality to infuse difference into the family system. Structural Family Therapy pays attention to the family organization and gets families to enact new and more functional hierarchies. Solution-Focused Brief Therapy shifts the focus of the therapeutic conversation from problem development to solution development, uncovering times in the family’s life when the problem was not present. Narrative Family Therapy explores how individuals and families have become totalized by dominant discourses, internalizing views of who they should be, and then works with people to deconstruct these understandings and reconstruct more hopeful storylines.
