Blue Ridge Family Therapy
What kind of therapy is this?
Individuals, couples, and families are welcome at Blue Ridge Family Therapy. People come with a range of problems, from those that seem to be "one person's problem" to issues more obviously family-oriented. In the therapy hour, individuals have the opportunity to bring their best thinking to bear on life's problems. Thoughtful consideration of issues often leads to new and more productive directions. The template for therapy at Blue Ridge Family therapy springs from the theoretical work of Murray Bowen, who studied and wrote about the human family and its functioning.
Psychiatrist Murray Bowen started with the simple observation that people in a family mutually influence one another. Bowen wanted to learn more about the reciprocal nature of human relating, and he was interested in how this worked in families with serious problems. In the late 1950's Bowen led a project at the National Institutes of Mental Health where entire families were hospitalized together for extended periods of time. Dr. Bowen and his staff studied their patterns of relating. Bowen was able to observe the many ways that families operate as a system. He noted that the problems in families are fostered and maintained by the functioning of each individual in that family system.
In therapy, each person has the opportunity to explore how their functioning contributes to the problem and/or could contribute to the needed solutions. Often it is helpful to look closely at how the various environments (family, work, school, even society) might be influencing problems. The individual exists in a complex world. Therapy promotes observation of that world and of one's self, which allows for thinking and reflecting, and these form the foundations for changed behavior.