Family Systems (see also Race, Gender & Sexual Abuse & Couples & Partnerships )

Are the conflicts with your children splitting your couple relationship? Are you struggling as a single parent (male or female)? Are you defensive or lost with the challenge of blending families and children from previous relationships? Have adoption issues blocked your relationships with others?

Whilst paying respect to the work of the classical pioneers in family systems therapy, RPL works with individuals within the family system from a post-modern perspective. This approach focuses on individuals in the family and their particular and unique issues or struggles. The family is viewed as an energetic system in which each individual in the family has become psychologically trapped. Rather than bringing the family together in the same room at the same time, individual work is undertaken along with occasional joint sessions between specific members of the family. In this way, each individual family member is helped to understand how they project their aggression or fear and withdrawal into the family system, trapping not only themselves but the other members of the family into fixed and repeated responses.

Families are also part of a wider energy system called the 'collective unconscious'. Working with family members on a one-to-one basis helps each family member to evaluate the impact of forces such as:

• social & economic conditions
• racial-gender-sexual abuse
• ethnic minority-religious group conformity
• cultural-historical interpretations of family structure
• multi-cultural integration
• empowerment of education & initiative within each individual family member.

Conflicts between parents and children, or family beliefs and the society around them, can best be understood in the light of the above.