Systemic therapy: understanding relationships and patterns

Sometimes a relationship goes awry, without it being exactly clear why. Tensions keep coming back, despite good conversations or good intentions. Systemic therapy does not just look at one person, but at the way people interact. This form of therapy focuses on the totality of relationships, whether within a family, a couple, colleagues or any other close-knit relationship.

Systemic therapy looks at patterns of interaction

Instead of treating individual complaints, systemic therapy looks at patterns of interaction. How do people react to each other? What roles have developed? And what happens when someone starts behaving differently? Exploring those kinds of questions often creates space for change.

How does systemic therapy work?

Systemic therapy, also called relationship and family therapy, is for people who together are part of a 'system'. This can be a family, but also a group of friends, team or couple. The starting point is that complaints or tensions are not separate from the dynamics between people.

The therapy helps with:

• relationship problems within families or couples

• conflicts or misunderstandings in composite families

• tensions between parents and children
• recurring patterns of argument or silence
• teams or groups in which cooperation is stagnating
• processing major events within the system

A systemic therapist guides conversations in which each group member is given space to share his or her experiences. The focus is on understanding each other's perspective, without looking for blame. It is about recognising what is going on and exploring how things can be done differently.

An example of systemic therapy

A mother and her adolescent daughter come to therapy together. The mother is worried: her daughter is contrary, closes herself off and regularly plays truant from school. In the sessions, it appears that both feel powerless. The mother experiences no grip, the daughter feels unheard. By looking at their interaction together, for instance how they react to each other's emotions, understanding emerges. They learn to recognise signals earlier and communicate with fewer allegations.

Effectiveness of systemic therapy

Systemic therapy does not offer ready-made solutions. What it does offer is a safe setting to learn to understand each other again. The change is often not in changing the other person, but in how we see and interact with each other. Evaluations of system-based programmes such as FAST show that this approach leads to more stability in families, less parenting stress and better cooperation between family members and social workers [NJi, 2021].

Wondering if systemic therapy is for you or your situation? Check out our list of therapists who work with it.