Therapy with a systemic perspective can be useful for individuals, couples, families or other social groups. Regardless of the number of people in therapy, the problem is not considered in terms of a mental health issue or a static personality issue; it is understood as a question of communication and relationship within the system of important people. This helps to avoid pathologizing and labeling the individual (the depressive, the neurotic, and so on) and increases the scope of action for improving the situation. Individual problems or symptoms are a sign that something in the whole system is not working properly.

Systemic therapy always conceives the problems of the individual in relation to the different contexts in which the person lives and develops his personality: for example, as partner of a couple, as daughter / son, as mother / father, as a friend.

It takes into consideration not only the closest relations of the person, but also the socio-economic circumstances, political processes and cultural, religious and community background in order to understand the emotional and psychological world of the individual. These factors directly affect the way we assess and comprehend different situations in our lives, but often we are not aware of them (e.g. a situation can be perceived very differently by a man or a woman, by a person with vast economic resources or a person with insufficient resources, by a person with Catholic beliefs or an atheist).

The participation of persons belonging to the family and the social system of a client can help to see the problems in a broader context and thus open up much more possibilities of approaching the problem. This participation can also be realized in a symbolic way, without these people actually being present, whereas the client gives them a voice and represents them in the therapy process.

The systemic perspective offers a view that promotes tolerance since it questions social norms based on black – white thinking (good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, true vs. false, etc..) and invites us to review our socially constructed beliefs that can contribute to the problematic situation.

Postmodern philosophy has changed the way we think about reality today. While in modernity it was thought that there is a unique and true reality that had to be discovered, today it is believed that reality is built by each observer. Humans do not internalize reality as it occurs in the external; but interpret, interact and construct stories and meanings about the functioning of the world.

Therefore there is a multiplicity of ways to explain the same thing. All these forms have their local validity and there is no way of understanding the reality that is more valid and correct than the others. Therefore no explanation can have the power to annul others.

The thinker Alfred Korzybsky spoke of the distinction between the map (what we have in mind about a thing) and the territory (the thing itself).

For example, we cannot represent in our mind the ocean with all its qualities, but we all have abstractions and images about what the ocean is (our map of the territory). There are many possible maps that can represent the same area, and although its use may be practical, that does not mean that we know the territory itself.

However, we can observe and experience the ocean in new ways, whether by swimming in it, by travelling by boat, by reading about it in magazines, by taking an interest in its flora and fauna. There are many ways in which we can approach the territory, which will change our map.

This is what opens up opportunities in therapy. During the dialogue new ways of conceiving the map about a problem can be found. In their conversation the client and the therapist work together and new definitions and descriptions of life can arise. Extending the map about who we are and what we want opens new possibilities of acting and feeling.

In contrast to modern therapeutic approaches, the client is not considered a subject that only provides information allowing the therapist to generate a diagnosis; as an active agent he co-constructs, co-designs and takes co-responsibility for the therapeutic process.

As the name indicates, therapy is seen as a collaborative process. The client and the therapist generate a dialogic society where an exchange of questions, opinions, ideas and meanings take place. The client and the therapist are partners in the conversation with the aim of finding and building solutions.

For these conversations the client always is considered the expert in his own life, who decides what is important to approach, what is useful in therapy and where the process should go. Likewise, the client is the one who defines the objective of the therapy and the moment when it has been reached.

The therapist can be considered an expert in conversation, whose participation facilitates a new kind of dialogue which brings to light new contents (solutions, meanings, definitions, forms of life). However, the therapist will never define himself as an expert or specialist in the life of the other.

Our stories

As human beings, we interpret and give meaning to the experiences of our life. We seek to explain the events and thus make sense of our stories and narrations.

We all have many stories about our relationships, important people and events of our lives. We tell stories about ourselves that describe our abilities, difficulties, values, actions, desires, successes, failures and many other aspects.

We are constant creators of narrations. However, these told stories do not reflect the lived experience, since it would be impossible to tell "everything". That is why we choose what to pay attention to, what to tell and what we consider important. These stories that we repeat many times become part of us and directly influence what we perceive as our identity.

Dominant and alternative stories

The stories to which we give more importance, become "dominant stories" in our life. However, the dominant stories do not cover reality and there are many other narrations we could elaborate about ourselves (alternative stories).

Also, human beings live life through several stories that can contradict each other. Accepting the complexity of life, we can say that sometimes we prefer a narration (or identity) of ourselves for certain contexts and a different one for others. While no narrative has the power to completely suppress the others, we have many possibilities to tell, define and live ourselves.

When a problem seems to suffocate our lives, there is usually a dominant story around this problem that becomes powerful in defining how we feel and describe, overshadowing all the other alternate narrations that form part of our lives.

Narrative Therapy

In Narrative Therapy we assume that there is the possibility of narrating an experience in many different ways which leads necessarily to the generation of various experiences where before there only seemed to be one. The client (or co-author) and the therapist work together to weave life stories richer and in a way that is more useful to the client.

The client’s experiences are recounted from different perspectives with rich descriptions, thereby alternate stories can emerge. A wider range of narrations of our life allows us to have a variety of ways of living, projecting towards the future and not limiting our way of perceiving reality through the problem. In this way, situations that seemed to have one or no exit, can turn into scenarios with diverse ways and solutions.