What is Systemic?
The word systemic comes from systems theory. In the 1950’s when many Psychiatrists were experimenting in working with whole families an English man called Gregory Bateson influenced the field greatly with his ideas on cybernetics and how, in systems theory, everything was connected. The idea that came from this is that people belong to systems, networks of relationships, within work, education, friends, family, community etc. All these systems of which a person is a part influence them, and the individuals influence the system. In systemic work what we are interested in is the network of relationships which influences the individual, couple, family or team and how, whatever difficulty they are facing at the time, is influencing the systems with in which they are a part – in a circular process.
