A Practical Guide to Family Therapy: Structured Guidelines and Key Skills

Grounded in systemic family therapy and drawing on a variety of other models to enhance skills development, this book is a comprehensive, practical guide to working with families.

This second edition is thoroughly updated and includes new chapters which cover working with First Nations Families, diversity and family therapy, understanding emotions, and dialogical reflective processes. The book begins with a focus on the therapeutic relationship and use of self as a foundation, and from there provides the reader with practical, skill-oriented guidelines for working with families. From the first session to addressing the complexities of separated parents, parent-child relational breaches, family of origin issues, wider systems, managing emotions, diversity, and much more, the book takes the reader through core practices that will become essential skills for family work.

Written by an expert team of authors committed to innovative and contextual practice, this book is for experienced clinicians who want to learn to work with families and for beginning therapists to learn from a structured approach to developing complex skills.

Andrew Wallis is a clinical social worker and systemic family therapist. He has worked with adolescents and their families for more than 30 years. Andrew’s clinical and research work at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network has primarily focused on family therapy approaches for eating disorders, clinical supervision and teaching.

Kerrie James, MSW, M.Litt, has taught and supervised family therapists for over 30 years in post graduate programs at Relationships Australia and the University of New South Wales Sydney. Her research and publications have focused on the intersections between family therapy, gender, family violence, and trauma.

Paul Rhodes is an Associate Professor at The University of Sydney with a wide range of clinical and research interests including family therapy, ecological emotions and the climate crisis, post-structural and New Materialist research methods and the decolonisation of psychology.