Systemic therapy for individuals

It explores how patterns learned in families and relationships shape your current emotions, choices and sense of identity. This type of therapy also supports you to develop more helpful ways of relating to yourself and others.

Rather than asking “What’s wrong with me?”, systemic therapy for individuals asks: “What has happened around me that has shaped how I feel, think and respond?”

Instead of seeing problems as internal flaws, the therapist helps you understand how you respond to others and how they respond to you.

What can systemic therapy for individuals help with?

This type of therapy can help you with:

• Anxiety or feeling overwhelmed
• Low mood or loss of direction
• Relationship difficulties
• Identity or sexuality
• Burnout or work stress
• Family conflict or estrangement
• Life transitions (parenthood, separation, bereavement)
• Patterns that repeat across generations

How does systemic therapy for individuals work in practice?

You might have 6 to 12 sessions over 3 to 6 months or more.

The therapist will use different theoretical models to explore what may be influencing and sustaining your problem(s).

They will support you to:

• Reflect on what has brought you to therapy and how your experiences are shaped by the systems you belong to. These include: family (past and present), romantic relationships, friendships, social networks, workplace and culture or religion
• Explore how change in one area of your life can affect others
• Understand how past experiences shape your current response
• Identify unhelpful patterns and create new ones
• Clarify your role in different relationships and, where needed, make changes to improve boundaries, communication, emotional expression and choice

How does systemic therapy for individuals help?

This type of therapy:

• Is especially helpful when your struggles feel tied to relationships, roles or expectations
• Doesn’t need a diagnosis or a fixed goal
• Offers a compassionate, non-blaming way to understand yourself
• Opens new possibilities for connection, choice and wellbeing

What evidence is there that this type of therapy works?

Research on systemic therapy for adults with depression shows that it can significantly reduce symptoms (see the article Efficacy of systemic therapy on adults with depressive disorders: A meta-analysis on the PubMed website).

Other studies exploring clients’ experiences of systemic therapy for individuals highlight how change often comes from seeing problems differently. For example in the article Systemic Individual Therapy: Therapeutic Change from the Perspective of Clients and Therapists on the ResearchGate website, clients describe becoming more accepting of others, letting go of rigid expectations, and understanding behaviour in context.

They reported that change began when they stopped seeing problems as purely ‘inside themselves’ but as part of patterns in relationships and interactions.