ABSTRACT
As stated in the first chapter, this model of therapeutic intervention with families in distress is experiential and the goal is to search for individual and relational resources by reframing pathology and looking at the positive connotations of people’s difficulties. In individual therapy, the alliance is formed simply between the therapist-client dyad. This process is more complex when we have to build an alliance with the family as a group. When an individual client asks for help, she usually knows what she is looking for; she has a personal motivation and an idea of what to get from therapy. When a couple ask for help, we need firstly to understand whether one partner brought the other one to therapy, sometimes coercing the partner to attend therapy, or whether they have a shared motivation to attend. Then we need to understand the nature of the problem and their definition of it. Often, there are disagreements on many levels. It is not uncommon for couples to provide different answers to even the simplest questions. For example, in answer to: “How long have you been experiencing this difficulty in your relationship?” one partner might answer, “For the last six months”, and the other might state, “For more than 15 years”.
