The Family Concept

The importance of strong parents, healthy families, and well-adjusted children, has been what strong social groups have been based on for may years. These aspects of the stable nation has changed over the past several generations. In essence, we have lost touch with the original concept of the family and have not replaced it with a different model, nearly destroying the concept in the process.

Some individuals have chosen not to marry, some have chosen not to have children while others have choses same gender relationships. In addition, our society has changed its concept of what constitutes a family, and we are adjusting our thoughts and behaviors regarding family values.  No one model has emerged as the right one so we remain in flux as to which model society should follow.

It is a known fact, though, that our family experiences influence us well past childhood. Family interaction is the initial and most lasting influence that each of us will ever know. The way that we experience our family members, whether present or absent determines what it means to us to be a human being. These experiences have formed the very basic and core belief about "who we are and how we behave".

The reason that the family systems model (which is not the same as the social family model) works in helping individuals define their own lives is that the conceptual focus is on the family system as a whole, and not on one individual member. Individual symptoms are viewed as by-products of relationship struggles, situations that are inherent in growing up in a group of other people, whether biological family members or not. Interventions are thus geared toward understanding each individual's behavior patterns, roles and functions, and how they fit into the complex matrix of the specific family system.

Family Systems Therapy

The family systems therapy model, considered in many constructs of the programs at InnerWisdom, Inc., is considered to be a philosophy and orientation to human problems, not simply a technique or form of therapy. Thus, a variety of approaches can be used together; enabling the individual to choose which methods best suits him and his individual situation. Because the concept is a theoretical orientation, it is not synonymous with the number of persons involved in therapy, nor whether the family members are all seen together as a group. This allows the focus to always be on the set of relationship issues in which the individual client is embedded, not necessarily on the individual family member(s) that may be responsible for the incident(s). Each client is seen as a sum total of his experiences and family interactions, all of which destroys or enhances health and happiness. Therefore, one of the goals of therapy is to help the individual develop a set of coping and life strategies that support his untapped prosperity and ultimate potential.