click to send a secure message
Introduction.
Dean combines systemic counselling with psychodynamic counselling to provide couples counselling.
Mara Aelvini Palazzoli
Overview of Systemic Therapy.
Everyone involved in a relationship has their own personality, ways of seeing things, sets of values and history. Systemic therapy aims to help people in a relationship by addressing their their interactional patterns and dynamics … addressing the relationship rather than addressing the individuals within the relationship.
Background to Development of Systemic Therapy
Mara Selvini Palazzoli (1916-1999) was an Italian psychiatrist and founder in 1971, with Gianfranco Cecchin, Luigi Boscolo and Giuliana Prata, of the systemic and constructivist approach to family therapy which became known as the Milan systems approach.
Early forms of systemic therapy were based on cybernetics – the study of computer systems. For example, a computer system is programmed to perform tasks one after the other, and choose different tasks depending on decisions that judge previous events in the system. In a human relationship, a couple might say that an argument began “when he says this”. If we begin by addressing this systemically, we can begin to understand not just that “he said that” but what prompted him to say it, what was going on in his process to say it, how did he experience something that happened just before he said it, was this in response to something his partner had said or done previously … and so on. It can be a complicated process – but in therapy we have time and can slow things down in order to understand how this relationship system works.
Systemic therapy helps us address complex systems – and hence complicated relationships within an intimate, human relationship. Systemic therapy focuses on practically addressing current relationship patterns, and it is limited in that it does not analysing in detail where the patterns came from (however, by adding psychodynamic therapy, we add the necessary process to also begin to understand where the patterns came from).
Use of Systemic Therapy in Couple Counselling.
When combined with psychodynamic counselling, Dean provides couple counselling that follows a “Milan” style of therapy – commonly used by Relate-trained therapists. This helps a couple to discover what’s going on in their relationship … and once understanding begins to take place, a couple can then become more free to make conscious choices about what they wish to change and, of course, what they wish to leave the same.
