A colleague of mine who rents an office in my suite is trying to get a young adult into treatment, but was venting to me about how frustrating it is to be dealing with this young person’s mother more than they are with the potential client.
This young adult missed their consultation call, which ...
Have you ever had the “Fix My Kid Effect” show up in your office
It’s when parents or caregivers decide everything would be better if their child changed, and sometimes they look to you because they expect you to take care of it for them.
Other times it’s a little more subtle, and the family wan...
by Oliver Drakeford LMFT CGP —
Oct 27, 2026
assessmentip
It was the best session you'd had with this family in weeks.
Dad finally held the line, Mom didn't rescue, and the fourteen-year-old actually did his homework without a fuss, so naturally you drove home blasting that Beyonce track you always play when you win.
Of course, the following week they ...
During this week's consultation group, a rather interesting dynamic was discussed, and we examined the idea of what happens when couples become too close and, as a result, set up a rigid boundary with the outside world.
There’s obviously nothing wrong with feeling close and connected to your par...
When I worked in residential treatment, a good number of teens did not want to be there and would corner me to explain, at volume, why they needed to go home today. When they failed to convince me, they’d call their parents, and I heard tears, threats, bargaining, and a few very creative bribes.
...
Hi there!
If you missed the Circular Questioning Workshop I ran on The Family Systems Collective last week, I've got a recap video and in this newsletter I'll tell you how to get hold of the PDF handout that I made to go with it.
Circular Questioning
Circular questions enable us to shift from ...
In the consultation group I ran yesterday, one theme that came up was setting consequences for teens, and if you work with families, you’re likely very familiar with this topic.
For most families, the advice of ‘age-appropriate consequences’ and ‘being consistent, clear and concise’ is always goi...
My associate JB has been working with a teen for a while, and despite her best efforts, has not been able to get the family to agree to family therapy sessions with another therapist. She’s been doing the best she can, fielding parent consultations and the occasional session with the teen and oth...
A first family session hands you an enormous amount of information at once, and in family systems therapy, there’s information that goes beyond what each member of the family says. Even if you manage to collect all of this information, most of us were never taught how to sort it out or make use o...
When families come to therapy, they usually want help fixing their problems, but they’re often hesitant or afraid to make changes. This paradox is at the core of many cases that get stuck and why I simultaneously love and hate family therapy.
Giving a family a task isn’t just about assigning home...
I moved from London to Los Angeles in my twenties and effectively drew an 8,000-mile boundary between us. If you'd asked me then, I'd have called it a career move, but it took eight years of my own four-times-a-week psychoanalysis to work out what an 8-hour time zone, an ocean, and a continent ac...
by Oliver Drakeford LMFT CGP —
Aug 11, 2026
cut off
I ran a treatment center for a few years, and part of that job was training therapists to think systemically, so watching a eyes glaze over as I explained how to create a hypothesis became very familiar to me.
I realize now that I was not only asking them to learn a theory, but I was asking them ...
