What is Contextual Family Therapy?

Contextual Family Therapy, developed by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, MD, offers a highly ethical, three-generational approach to successfully making concrete interventions with family members who are feeling stuck. Contextual Therapy has been taught internationally since its inception. It addresses issues that are universally human, and respects all cultural styles and life approaches. As well as offering healing of deeply engrained life problems, Contextual Therapy is concerned with prevention, and seeks to establish a grounding sense of the resources that family systems offer their members, resources that have often been unacknowledged.

While Contextual Therapy is deeply compassionate, it is not afraid to address any issue that is blocking health and development of family members. It is concerned with fairness and with hearing everyone's perceptions. Contextual therapists also integrate other modes of family therapy including the work of Bowen, Satir, Whitaker, and Minuchin, Hughes as well as the major contributions of Monica Mc Goldrick in assessment using the genogram, awareness of the family life cycle, and sensitivity to ethnic and multicultural diversity. Many contextual therapists integrate trauma therapies as well as transpersonal and somatic therapies. Therapists who are seeing children and teens find that it provides an exceptional framework for parent meetings and for parent-child dyadic interventions.