“Wait- my shrink is a Family Therapist?!”
Why a Family Therapist is the best counselor for you, even when you are going all by yourself.
My first job in Austin was in a methadone clinic.
If you aren’t familiar, methadone is a synthetic opiate drug than does not provide the “high” that drugs like heroin or oxycontin or percocet give users.
Taking a physician-prescribed dose of methadone can, for some patients, be a medically-managed way to reduce use of abused drugs, like the aforementioned, without the debilitating side effects of withdrawal.
One of my patients, when I worked as a counselor at the clinic, discovered that the license I was working under was a “Marriage and Family Therapy” license.
In response to his “You’re a Marriage Counselor?!” which he exclaimed with a scrunched up face, I pointed out that addiction is a family disease.
But I got it. He was picturing the business-suit-clad couples counselor in movies, who was wearing too much makeup and had an expensively decorated office. That stereotypical shrink who urged husbands to talk about their feelings with their wives and urged wives to ask their husbands for what they really needed.
In my husband and I's rush to watch all of The Office before Netflix removes it from their network, we recently enjoyed Jim and Pam sharing "their truth" with each other, while they "acknowledged and appreciated" the sacrifices they were making for their family.
I understood my patient's confusion about why a Marriage and Family Therapist was his counselor at a methadone clinic.
And yeah- I am a Marriage and Family Therapist.
Which doesn’t really mean all of those things that movies say it means.
(WHaaa? The movies aren't real life?!)
Someone, like myself, with a Marriage and Family Therapy license, has studied Systems Theory. On a very basic level, this means that rather than viewing your problems as being created within you (your thinking, your behavior, your feelings) Family Therapists are interested in the system(s) are you a part of and how they help you be the way that you are.
Imagine the cogs in a clock. The clock tics because the cogs fit together, being the exact size and shape that they are. If one cog were a different shape, it wouldn't fit with the others, and the clock wouldn't work.
When your spouse does A, you respond with B, and maybe your child does C. I like to look at how you being B in your family makes you B in the rest of your life. And whether or not being B best serves you (and your family, friends and coworkers). Because if any of the players changed their behavior- if your spouse did something different, or if your child did something different, or (what you actually have control over- ) if YOU did something different, the whole system (your family) would function differently.
Our circumstances are so much bigger than the simplicity that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) would have us believe.
Now don't get me wrong- Tony Robbins helped me out a ton in my 20's, in teaching me how much my thoughts affect how I feel and make choices. CBT is incredibly empowering and very easy to validate because it is linear. This is what makes it the most empirically validated method of therapy for most disorders.
But choosing how a person thinks or behaves only takes us so far without looking at the environment that is contributing to those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Thanks to systems theories, Marriage and Family Therapists have more to work with in understanding not only the situation, but how to improve the situation.
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