ABSTRACT
This chapter presents three of the most prominent trends in family therapy: the movement toward common factors, core competencies, and a focus on outcome-informed practice. Extratherapeutic factors are those aspects about the client that lead to change and account for 40 percent of variance. The therapeutic relationship accounts for 30 percent of change for clients. All variations of common factors in psychotherapy hold the therapeutic relationship to be one of the key ingredients to positive client change. Recently, there has been a push away from using a specific model in exchange for operating from a position of those factors that most influence therapy that are a part of all models. Family therapy as a field has followed the clinical psychology field in shifting toward empirically supported treatments. In 2004, the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) developed a listing of 128 core competencies that were organized around six primary and five secondary domains.
