ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the systems-oriented approaches to couple therapy. It provides a brief historical perspective on couple therapy. The chapter also provides several common clinical interventions shared by many systems-oriented couple therapists. Strategic, structural, and systemic approaches to couple therapy are concerned with how couples organize and communicate. Brief Strategic Couple Therapy is based on the premise that resolving a couple's problematic interaction pattern will result in improved functioning. Strategic interventions are utilized to interrupt ironic interaction sequences that maintain the complaint or targeted symptom. Brief Strategic Couple Therapy has become more focused on research and theory development with couples wherein one partner experiences health problems, most notably at the University Of Miami Medical School. Strategic therapy evolved from this work at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto and was further influenced by the work of Milton Erickson and his use of hypnosis and paradoxical strategies.
