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...

In my first family session, I let the most talkative member steer the session for 40 minutes, while the rest of the family observed. Nobody taught me that opening a family session follows a sequence, with specific signs and a clear moment to shift from rapport-building to therapy, so I didn’t giv...

In a first family session, you need to collect a lot of data—and some comes before you ask your first question. TLDR: This week, I'm breaking down the six structural concepts that let you read any family's architecture from the first session — subsystems, boundaries, hierarchy, triangulation, an...