History of Marital Family Therapy
Family marital therapy is a combination of social science and psychology that involves intervention. This therapy seeks to provide treatment and support and strengthen marriages and the family unit. Professional family marital therapists are mental health experts trained at providing psychotherapy. According to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, there has been a 50-fold increase in the number of marriage and family therapists since 1970, and 98 percent of therapy clients report that they had a good experience with the therapy they received.
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Developmental Roots
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Professionals did not actually begin practicing family therapy until the 1950s, but the roots of family therapy relative to psychoanalysis were explored much earlier. In fact, family therapy is a spin-off of patient-therapist psychotherapy method.
Carl Rogers, one of the founders of this therapy model, believed that therapists could treat their patients more effectively in a warm, safe environment where they felt free to discuss their issues and gained some insight about them. Psychotherapy techniques are less important than being a genuine, empathetic and accepting therapist.
Understanding Human Behavior
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Family therapy provided a new way of looking at human behavior. Family therapists believe emotional problems develop and continue to play out within the family environment. This perspective provided a new focus for treatment that included the patient and the family. This casual model of treatment reveals the different roles family members take on to stabilize behavior patterns. For instance, if there is a rebellious child disrupting a family, a sibling may automatically take on the "good child" role to alleviate family stress.
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The Child Guidance Movement
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The child guidance movement was a big influence on the development of family therapy. The movement was based on the idea that psychological problems started in childhood. This meant that early intervention is the best way to prevent problems in the future with mental illness. The treatment focused first on helping the child, and the parents were treated separately. The family is included in the therapy.
Social workers were also a big part of evolving family marital therapy. Social workers were known for visiting patients in their homes to observe the family atmosphere and understand any family problems as well as possible. This family-oriented therapy model greatly influenced the developing family marital therapy field.
The Role of Marriage in Family Therapy
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Early family psychoanalyst studies conducted in Palo Alto, California, during the 1950s discovered that a child's relationship with his mother and father influenced the development of schizophrenia in children later in life. Researcher Theodore Lidz noticed that a large number of schizophrenia patients participating in his study came from single-parent homes and had dysfunctional relationships with a family member, especially their fathers. Lidz's observations of how family interaction related to symptomatic behavior was another important step toward family marital therapy.
Marriage Counseling
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Marriage counseling is another therapy model that contributed to the development of family marital counseling. The earliest records of marriage therapy occurred during the 1930s. Doctors realized the advantages of treating married couples together. This led to a continued understanding of the role family relationships and marital conflict played in childhood development.
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References
- Photo Credit Married couple feelings image by Oleg Kulakov from Fotolia.com
