What is an MFT?
Marriage and Family Therapy (formally Marriage, Family and Child Counseling) is a branch of psychotherapy that works with individuals, families and children to nurture change and development. It is typically solution-focused and brief. It tends to view things in terms of the systems of interactions between people. It emphasizes relationships as an important factor in psychological health. As such, problems are typically viewed as emerging from systemic interactions with others, rather than the sole creation of individuals. MFT’s may focus more on how patterns of thought and behavior maintain the problem rather than trying to identify the cause (as in psychoanalysis). It assumes that the family, and society as a whole, is larger than the sum of its parts. Requirements for licensure include a master’s degree in Psychology, passage of a comprehensive examination and two years of full time, supervised experience.
