ABSTRACT
Dear reader – you’ve made it! You have allowed yourself to be showered with systemic ideas and somehow you got to the end. Perhaps you skipped a lot of the text or, like with a scary detective novel, you started at the end. We don’t mind, in our circular world any end isn’t really the end, it’s just another beginning. Maybe it is the beginning for you to have the courage to put some of what you have learned into practice. Ten minutes for the family may have seemed over-ambitious – it is not! Hopefully you have discovered that ‘thinking families’, thinking systemically, is almost always a useful frame when dealing with patients, no matter whether it is just one or five people in the room with you. And you don’t even need 10 minutes for it – as we hope we have demonstrated. You have also discovered that the asking of questions is often more useful than the giving of answers. But what will you make of it all? Are you going to use any of it, or will the text of this book just remain a collection of words, with its cover collecting dust? What are the chances of you translating any of the words into action? Please let us know, we are ever so curious.
