How Systemic Psychotherapy Completely Changed My Life!
Traditionally, most forms of therapy focus on the individual experience. Which makes sense, right? After all, therapy is all about healing yourself and moving on from the things that hold you back. However, is there a better way to conduct therapy?
In recent years, a new form of therapy is rising in popularity with many therapists in the United Kingdom. Although systemic psychotherapy was developed a few decades ago, it works to address a variety of issues that many counselors find with individual-focused sessions. A lot of talk therapies just focus on your personal feelings and thoughts. Instead, systemic therapy believes that we have connections with those around us. Additionally, we share the problems we face with our families, communities, and social groups.
Peter Straton, a professor in family therapy at Leeds University states that, “These systems can get stuck in unhelpful patterns, created by the roles they make us play, the beliefs they are based on, and the ways of organising and communicating they rely on.”
When I first discovered systemic psychotherapy, back in 1998, I wasn’t sure how beneficial it could really be. After having undergone personal therapy using this model, I realized how beneficial this new type of talk therapy was for me. Here are just a few of the reasons why it changed my life!
The Focus Is Not On You, As An Individual
At first, this was something I really had to wrap my head around. However, thinking about it more, I realized they were right. Traditional therapy puts the focus on the individual, which can be a very isolating experience and not helpful in the long term. For instance, instead of using “blaming terms” such as this person is so selfish, it reframes them to relational terms. Relational terms are the thoughts that recognize that when you are having problems; it can boil down to patterns of communication that have contributed to your issues.
We don’t truly function alone in life and this type of therapy recognizes the outside sources of our pain.
The Focus Is On The Present Not The Past
Traditional talk therapies place an emphasis on the past. They focus on the past because they believe those experiences root themselves in our minds, causing the present-day issues we have.
The power with systemic psychotherapy is that it never tries to get to the root cause. Instead, it focuses on the group systems we are part of and how the maladaptive patterns and behaviors within them are the causes of our issues.
Our Problems Are Circular, Not Linear
Other therapeutic methods focus on the cause and effect that happens over time. Essentially, your past problems resulted in today’s issues. Instead of this, systemic therapy sees life as repeating cycles and processes. It doesn’t place blame on one single thing, but recognizes that repeated patterns, over time, have contributed to the struggles you face today.
This was crucial for my own life in understanding that what I was facing could not be blamed on any one thing from the past.
These are just some of the ways that systemic psychotherapy helped me to reframe my thoughts and led me to want to study more about it! While it is a rather new type of talk therapy, the powerful transformations I have seen because of it are remarkable.
If you are ready to try systemic psychotherapy out for yourself or have any questions, contact my office!
