Family and Systemic Therapies

Psychotherapies that treat the couple, family or parent-child relationship as the unit of care, working with the system's patterns and roles rather than one person's inner life alone. This includes couples and relationship-focused work (couples therapy, emotionally focused therapy), classic family-systems schools (family therapy, structural family therapy, strategic family therapy, systemic therapy, multisystemic therapy, internal family systems model), and parent and infant focused protocols (parent management training, parent-child interaction therapy, parent-child interaction assessment-II modifying attributions of parents, parent-infant psychotherapy, dyadic developmental psychotherapy). A therapy delivered to a family or couple audience but organized around an individual cognitive, behavioral or psychodynamic mechanism rather than the relational system itself is grouped under that mechanism instead.