ABSTRACT
Family therapy often involves helping the entire family or a portion of it to meet outside the therapy session and discuss how to deal with some situation. Therapists are well advised to learn how to capitalize on the 167 hours in the week beyond the weekly family session. For example, treatment of child behavior problems commonly consists of helping parents find the time and place to decide together how they will handle a particular child behavior problem. Dr. Anton Smets (Brock & Barnard, 1988) has parents meet in their bathroom. This meeting serves to physically define the adults in the family as a parental dyad. Similarly, treatment of marital difficulties often requires that the spouses meet and come to a shared understanding of an event in their day-to-day lives or how they intend to handle some situation. In our experience, the potency of these out-of-session meetings can be intensified when the power of the metaphor related to the problem is linked with a physical context for addressing it.
