ABSTRACT
John Bowlby was perhaps the very first family therapist . He wrote his paper, “Forty-four Juvenile Thieves,” in 1944 . In it, he noted that “behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair .” He pinpoints here the emotional drama behind the negative actions of his young clients . He also suggests that, if you understand a person’s relational context, all their responses, no matter how seemingly bizarre or dysfunctional, are eminently reasonable, even if, at first, they appear “exaggerated or distorted” (Bowlby, 1988, p . 81) .
