A Therapist’s Most Important Tool

We tend to think that modern-day therapy is more advanced than ever when it comes to therapists using themselves in the room with clients—that earlier generations prized restraint, neutrality, and the idea of the therapist as a “blank slate,” quietly reflecting rather than actively shaping the process. Intervening, especially in the charged terrain of family dynamics, was often seen as unprofessional—even harmful. But the truth is far more nuanced.

Many of yesterday’s therapists didn’t just sit back; they stepped in. They guided, challenged, slowed things down, and, at times, offered clear, direct insight. In the 1960s and 1970s, at teaching hospitals and clinics across the country, they were laying the groundwork for what we now recognize as a more engaged, relational form of therapy—one that sees the therapist not as a passive observer, but as an active agent of change, a catalyst, and a companion in the client’s healing journey.

Few figures embody this shift more than Salvador Minuchin, the Argentine-born psychiatrist and pioneer of structural family therapy. Trained in medicine before turning to child psychiatry, Minuchin developed his approach while working with underserved families in New York, where he began to map the invisible structures—alliances, hierarchies, and boundaries—that shape family life. His work revealed that symptoms don’t exist in isolation, but are often embedded in relational systems. Widely considered the father of modern family therapy, he’d go on to shape the work of some of psychotherapy’s most influential voices, like Jay Haley and Virginia Satir.

At age 92, Minuchin was still challenging the status quo in what was to be his last book, The Craft of Family Therapy: Challenging Certainties. Shortly after the book’s release in 2013, Networker writer Mary Wylie reflected on Minuchin’s craft and contributions.

“Minuchin and the other family therapy pioneers didn’t merely inject a bit of fresh air into this hothouse,” she writes. “They blew the roof right off, taking all the furniture and psychoanalytic tomes along with it. Not only was the focus of their new therapy different, but so was their view of the therapist. No longer the self-contained cipher, sitting mostly silent and sometimes invisible behind the patient’s head, this new kind of therapist—dazzlingly exemplified by Minuchin himself—was brash, interventionist, bossy, and frequently in clients’ faces. In fact, the therapist’s personality—the ‘self of the therapist,’ as it eventually came to be called—was considered a key player in the sometimes rowdy goings-on in session.”

“The idea was to help the dancers dance, and the therapist would be the one leading the do-si-do,” Minuchin recalled later.

It’s precisely this kind of active, in-the-moment engagement—part intuition, part technique—that continues to shape how therapists think about their role today. Contemporary clinicians, including Esther Perel, often point back to Minuchin as not only a role model, but a continual source of inspiration. “I cannot even tell you how completely revolutionary your work was in my thinking,” Perel told Minuchin at a 2017 Networker dinner event honoring his legacy. “What you taught us was the use of yourself, that you will never be the same person two sessions in a row…. All of us carry you inside of us in so many ways.”

There is still much we can learn from Minuchin’s work—from his candor, his humor, and his willingness to step into the unknown with clients. “Students today are buried under an avalanche of textbooks and subject to a cacophony of different lectures,” Wylie wrote. “They learn all about theory and technique. They’re taught to become highly proficient technicians, experts in the deployment of many methodologies. But where and when do they learn who they are and how to deploy their own selves in therapy?” When it comes to therapists using themselves as instruments in the therapeutic process, few have done so as skillfully as Minuchin, or with as much clarity, creativity, and courage.

The following is an excerpt we originally published in 2013 from The Craft of Family Therapy. Over a decade later, Minuchin’s words feel more important than ever. His willingness to adapt, step forward, and meet clients where they are is no less relevant today.

When a family comes into your office, what do you do? What’s the correct way to start the session? Do you ask about the problem? Do you offer your services as a healer? Do you smile and ask about the trip to the office? Are you silent until one family member begins to talk? Yes, yes, and yes. Therapy is an encounter between strangers preparing themselves for a significant journey together. Therefore, the early joining in the process will be idiosyncratic, depending on the particular family and the particular therapist. It’s a journey that starts in uncertainty.

Most new therapists tend to fall back on theory as a way to reduce their anxiety so they can function. But how do you choose a theory that’ll enable you to be effective? These young therapists look at therapy as a course of action in which the therapist observes a family and implements techniques to help them with their problems. They don’t understand the complexity of the process. The craft of therapy includes not only an understanding of the characteristics of the family and a grasp of techniques that can facilitate change, but an awareness of how they, the therapists, are functioning within the therapeutic system.

There are many ways of learning how to become a family therapist, and these methods have changed over the last 50 years or so. When family therapy first began, in 1957, there were no family therapy theories. There were no introductory textbooks on different family therapy approaches. The field was not yet established, and the ideas and understandings of how families functioned and what to do with them were hidden within the families that were being seen. Practitioners learned by viewing and doing. The originators of the field—people like Nathan Ackerman, Murray Bowen, Jay Haley, Virginia Satir, Carl Whitaker, and others—developed their understanding through meeting with families and then evaluating what happened in the session.

Over time, these experiential learnings developed into theories of how to therapeutically engage families, and institutes were created where therapists could learn how to work in this new way. To get training as a family therapist, a clinician, who was probably originally an individual therapist, might attend one of the institutes of family therapy, such as the Mental Research Institute, the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center, the Georgetown Family Institute, (now the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family) or the Ackerman Institute. The therapy room was the classroom, where the learning took place by doing. These institutes mainly provided a particular view of why families have difficulties and what therapists could do to help them. The people who came to learn were offered training that was grounded primarily in one approach. They weren’t bombarded with the multitude of different theories that the present generation of students is struggling to assimilate.

Currently, new practitioners in family therapy are trained in university settings, not institutes. Learning comes from textbooks for classes that try to provide a wide foundation for the field, so that people have the knowledge designated as necessary by state licensing boards. The brunt of learning comes in the classroom, rather than the therapy room. Students are expected to digest a variety of approaches, then are asked to use one or more of these theories as a guideline for their practice when they begin to see families.

A few years ago, I was invited by colleagues at Nova Southeastern University to conduct an informal training practicum for graduate students, who were just beginning their experience as practitioners. My goal was to offer an alternative to the type of training generally provided, in which they first learn the theories that are the foundations of the diverse schools of family therapy, and then apply theory to practice. Through this procedure, trainees are learning to be restrained, protective, and respectful of the client, to avoid entering into conflict with patients, and to search for the techniques that “truly fit” the problem that the clients present. In effect, they’re training for cautiousness, guarding against the imposition of their own framework on problems that the family presents. If my view about this training is correct, it’s a training that discourages students from looking at themselves as resources in the therapeutic practice.

In accepting the invitation of my colleagues at Nova, I joined them in exploring a different, more inductive process of training. We started out without a clear curriculum, simply asking the students to bring videotapes from the therapy sessions they were conducting in practicum situations. We observed the style and nature of their work and talked with them about their experiences. Over time, we were able to move toward the development of a method for training in the craft of family therapy.

Our first observations of the students at work provided important building blocks for this development. As they began to interview families, their styles of interviewing presented some common characteristics. They were, of course, anxious, since they had scant experience with encounters involving more than one person, and they usually proceeded with caution and were polite. They asked questions that were frequently a paraphrasing of the client’s last statement, such as “So you said that it troubled you when you saw what your daughter was doing?” They also asked questions that encouraged clients to continue explaining, as well as questions directed at tracking the narrative but without opening up new explorations. Paradoxically, they also became quickly engaged in trying to explain, support, protect, or improve the family drama.

The combination put these new practitioners in a quandary. They were engaged in monitoring narrow aspects of the family presentation before they had a clear knowledge of how the family members related, their history, or their efforts at problem solving. They felt the need to do something to demonstrate their competence and responded to family problems before knowing the family. Most didn’t know how to be silent or how to use silence as a tool. And, noticeably, they focused mostly on the pathology the family offered as the reason for requesting help, ignoring the exploration of strength, resilience, and resources by which family members might become helpers of each other.

Our students came with different life experiences, but we noticed a major commonality in their presentation of cases: they didn’t include themselves in the process. They’d describe the family dynamics, sometimes with surprising clarity, but always as if they were objective, neutral observers. When we asked for feedback from students observing the tapes, they responded with alternative descriptions of the family’s transactions, but the participation of the therapist in producing this behavior wasn’t mentioned.

These lacunae, empty spaces in observing and describing the therapeutic process, were surprising to me. I remembered that at the beginning of the family therapist movement, all training programs struggled with the issue of the participation of the therapist in the therapeutic process, and with the therapist’s awareness of that reality. At that time, most trainees in family therapy came with some experience in psychodynamic individual therapy, and many had undergone their own psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. The family therapy trainers needed to address the necessity of providing an alternative to the long, intensive involvement in self-observation that psychodynamic therapy provided.

Many institutes began to include a focus on the self of the therapist in the first year of training. Virginia Satir scheduled retreats with her students and their families, in which the students explored their participation at different stages of development in their families of origin, using the techniques of psychodrama. Carl Whitaker promoted the idea that therapists should access and utilize themselves in the therapy room, and that to do this they’d need to come to terms with their own thoughts. Murray Bowen stated in his 1974 book, Toward the Differentiation of Self in One’s Family of Origin, “I believe and teach that the family therapist usually has the very same problems in his own family that are present in families he sees professionally, and that he has a responsibility to define himself in his own family if he is to function adequately in his professional work.” In other words, all these master therapists believed that training to become a family therapist started with an exploration of one’s own self, which would then aid the trainee inside the therapy room.

The university training programs of today, it seems, have shifted from a focus on the self of the therapist to a focus on what has become known as core competencies. These competencies are concerned primarily with how to conceptualize cases and how to structure and engage in therapy sessions. There are several competencies that refer to the therapist’s awareness of the impact the family is having on him or her, but, overwhelmingly, the trainee is expected to be thinking about what to do, rather than who they are.

Throughout my professional career, I’ve considered the therapist’s awareness of an intervention to be an essential part of the formation of an effective therapist. In our program, the students started their presentations by describing relevant aspects of their own life and the ways in which these experiences molded their therapeutic style. Only then did they describe the characteristics of the family they were presenting. After that, they examined the techniques and strategies they’d used. In our discussions throughout the training, I continuously invoked the metaphor of a therapist who has formed, on his or her left shoulder, a homunculus who’s engaged in observing the therapist’s mental processes and is involved in silent dialogues with the therapist as she or he works.

All therapists need a range of tools in order to master their craft, but tools are just that—a means to accomplish an objective. When the carpenter begins with a piece of wood, he has an end goal in mind: to change that wood into something else. The saw, chisel, hammer, and nail are a means of transforming what the carpenter first sees into what he wants it to become. The effective family therapist also uses tools as means to an end, not as ends in themselves. The craft of family therapy lies in how these tools are used to produce a difference in the family—a useful change. An enactment on its own doesn’t move the family. But a therapist who understands that the enactment is a way to view the family’s interaction is able to help shift the process.

The most important tool is the therapist’s use of self in guiding the process of change; and understanding how to use that tool is the biggest obstacle for beginning therapists. Ultimately, learning how to use the silent dialogue with the homunculus on one’s shoulder is central to mastering the essential craft of family therapy.

Minuchin, S., Reiter, M., & Borda, C. (2013) The Craft of Family Therapy: Challenging Certainties, Routledge, NY. Reprinted with permission.