ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors see interventions as what happens when a family and a therapist are together; that is, they see the whole interview as punctuation in the family's experience which can make a difference to them. The authors have tried in their work and in their teaching to make a distinction between the thinking about the family as an interacting system and the thinking about what the therapist needs to do to create, or facilitate, a context of change. These are two distinct stages in the therapy, and the authors try to highlight the differences between them by making a formulation about the family system before they think about making an intervention in the family. The authors think about setting tasks for families when it seems that the family may be too involved with the team, particularly where words are a familiar currency and where action could be seen as less familiar and hence more perturbing.
