Atlas›Domains›Domain V
Domain V of XVI

Systemic, relational, group & community

177guides
3,938weighted interventions
1988median founding year
335512mean Agape · Logos · Mythos

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Domain synthesis

What "healing" means here

The systemic families treat healing as a shift in a pattern larger than one person. A symptom is "held in place" by the family's current organisation V-014, or persists because of the attempted solutions that keep it going V-012, or is maintained by repetitive, complementary family interactions V-036 V-034. Change means restructuring those patterns or interrupting the loop. A second, overlapping strand makes healing a repaired relationship: attachment ruptures are mended so a young person can turn to caregivers again V-038, a secure bond is rebuilt around the question "Are you there for me?" V-063, and relationship repair comes through emotion coaching and a therapeutic apology V-039 V-053. Contextual therapy frames healing as restored relational ethics — a fairer balance of give and take, and trustworthiness across generations V-009. Behavioural and parenting programmes define it more narrowly as observable behaviour change and the reversal of coercive cycles V-037 V-046 V-048.

The mutual-aid and recovery strands redefine healing again. Twelve-step fellowships describe it as abstinence reached through acceptance of lost control and surrender to something beyond the self V-099 V-114, and faith-based versions as dependence on God or Christ V-122 V-113. Secular fellowships recast the same goal as self-management and self-empowerment V-115 V-116, and some explicitly allow moderation rather than abstinence V-119. The community-service and rights strands locate healing outside the person altogether: in citizenship and open-door care V-140, in housing treated as a right rather than a reward V-145, in "personal recovery" — a satisfying, hopeful life with or without symptoms V-146, and in a better fit between the person and the welfare system V-176. Indigenous and community practices describe healing as holistic (mental, physical, emotional, spiritual) and as reconnection to culture, family, community and land after colonisation V-180 V-182 V-178. A recurring tension is whether any of this is "therapy" at all: therapeutic communities, peer groups and most fellowships insist they are not V-091 V-128 V-099 V-130; a further split sets clinical against personal recovery V-146 and abstinence against moderation V-115 V-119.

What "the self" or "the person" is here

The baseline image is a relational, systemic self. Bowen theory "views the family as an emotional unit" whose members are so interdependent that one person's change shifts the others V-008; group analysis makes the individual "a nodal point in a network of relationships" V-084; ecological and community models place the person inside nested, interdependent systems V-032 V-136. Couple models narrow the unit to the dyad — Dicks's "marital joint personality" V-006 — and several say the relationship itself "lives in the space between" the partners V-075 V-065. Attachment-based child and caregiver models assume a person who "learns who they are from how attuned adults experience them" and who co-regulates stress biology through a caregiver V-053 V-058. Cultural, feminist and liberation models add a gendered, classed and politically situated self shaped by power and culture V-027 V-028 V-137. The rights-based and peer traditions assume a person with legal capacity, preferences and expertise-by-experience, not a patient V-134 V-176 V-131. Indigenous frameworks extend the person outward to community, Country and cosmos, with cultural authority held by Elders rather than clinicians V-181 V-182 V-180.

Mechanisms of change the domain names

  • Altering interaction patterns: interrupting the "more of the same" solution loop V-012; restructuring family transactions V-036 V-014; live enactment that changes experience in the room V-014 V-038.
  • Systemic questioning and reflexivity: circular, reflexive and interventive questions that prompt the family's own "self-healing" V-019 V-016; reflecting-team processes V-021; dialogue that creates shared words for the not-yet-spoken V-022.
  • New emotional and relational experience: change through new emotion inside attachment-salient interactions rather than insight or skills V-063; corrective, here-and-now experiential encounter V-010 V-011; memory reconsolidation V-075.
  • Attachment co-regulation: co-regulating fear and shame and co-creating new meaning V-053; nurturance given even when the child does not elicit it V-058.
  • Behavioural learning: coercion theory and operant contingencies V-046 V-048 V-050; contingent parental attention V-047.
  • Grace, surrender and spiritual change: acceptance then surrender V-099 V-114; working the Principles in dependence on a Higher Power V-122.
  • Community and mutual aid as the agent: "community as method" V-093; replacing a shrinking network with a "healing" network of other families V-040; peer modelling and reduced isolation V-088 V-089.
  • Ritual gathering and social repair: convening the whole network as modern "tribal healing" V-003; conscientisation joined to collective action V-137 V-138 V-098.

Shared techniques

Story and word dominate the systemic schools: structured interviewing and question families V-019 V-015, and the genogram or "family diagram" as the core assessment tool V-008. Spatial and imagery methods appear as family sculpting V-010 and systemic constellations V-017. A large video-feedback cluster is distinctive to this domain — VIG, Marte Meo, VIPP-SD and PCIT's live "bug-in-the-ear" coaching V-055 V-056 V-057 V-047. Relationship is itself the instrument, used deliberately through enactment and the "person of the therapist" V-014 V-011. Practice, exposure and skills training recur in behavioural couple and family work and in the WHO low-intensity programmes: communication and problem-solving drills V-041 V-066, behavioural activation and slow breathing V-158 V-165 V-160, and graded attention-retraining in sex therapy V-078. Group and community formats run from the interpersonal process group V-083 and psychoeducational group V-095 to multifamily groups V-040, and to circle practices with a talking piece — council, yarning circles and healing circles V-156 V-181 V-180. The twelve-step and peer traditions share ritualised practice: meetings, steps, a sponsor and shared reading V-099 V-114 V-120, and written personal plans such as WRAP or the recovery contract V-132 V-066. Touch and rhythm are central only in a few places (Theraplay, sensate focus) V-052 V-078.

Developmental or stage models

Phase-structured treatment manuals are common: FFT's five phases V-034, ABFT's five tasks V-038, Child-Parent Psychotherapy's three phases V-054, network therapy's six phases V-003, and contextual therapy's three-phase model V-009. Both main couple "emotion-focused" lines are staged — Johnson's three stages and nine steps V-063 and Greenberg's five stages and fourteen steps V-064 — and discernment counselling frames three possible paths rather than a cure V-076. The Bader-Pearson developmental model reads couples through Mahler's separation-individuation stages (symbiosis, differentiation, practising, rapprochement) V-072, while Bowen names a multigenerational transmission process V-008. Recovery and fellowship paths are themselves stage models: the Twelve Steps V-099, Women for Sobriety's six Levels of Recovery V-118, SMART's 4-Point programme V-115, Andresen, Oades and Caputi's five-stage recovery model V-146, and the Buddhist Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path V-120 V-121. Rolland's Family Systems Illness model adds illness time phases V-025, and the Tree of Life stages a group journey (Tree, Forest, Storms, Celebration) V-154.

Distinctive contribution

This domain repeatedly moves the unit of healing beyond the individual — to the couple, family, social network, peer group, community, service system and nation or Country. It holds the atlas's main body of non-professional, peer-led and mutual-aid approaches, many of which insist they are explicitly not therapy V-099 V-128 V-131. And it contributes service-level and rights-based models — open-door psychiatry, Housing First, assertive community treatment, supported living and personal ombudsmen — that locate change in a person's environment, relationships and entitlements rather than inside their mind V-140 V-145 V-144 V-177 V-176.

All 177 guides in this domain

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