When something isn't right, the natural tendency is to look for the cause within yourself. "What's wrong with me?" is almost always the first question. But sometimes, the more useful question is another: "What's happening around me — and how does it affect me?"
That, in essence, is what the systemic perspective proposes.
Thinking in systems, not isolated individuals
The systemic perspective starts from an apparently simple idea with profound implications: we don't exist in isolation. We're part of systems — family, couple, work, social — and what we feel and do is in constant interaction with those systems.
That doesn't mean individual responsibility doesn't exist. It means that understanding it in context makes it more real and more manageable. Your anxiety isn't just "your" anxiety — it's also the anxiety of a family system that never learned to manage it, the pressure of a work environment that normalises it, or the tension of a relationship that avoids certain topics.
Where does this approach come from?
Systemic therapy has its roots in the family therapy of the 1950s and 60s, with figures like Murray Bowen, Virginia Satir and Salvador Minuchin. But it has evolved far beyond classic family therapy. Today, the systemic perspective is applied to individual, couples and group work as a lens that broadens understanding of what's going on.
What the systemic perspective illuminates
Intergenerational patterns: ways of relating, of expressing (or repressing) emotions, of handling conflict that are passed down from generation to generation without anyone consciously choosing them.
Assigned roles: the responsible one, the mediator, the problematic one, the invisible one. Many people arrive at therapy without knowing they've spent their whole life playing a role they never chose.
Invisible loyalties: decisions we make — or avoid — out of unconscious fidelity to our system of origin. "In my family we don't talk about these things" isn't just a phrase: it's a systemic mandate that conditions your capacity to be authentic.
Sometimes, what looks like an individual problem is the expression of something happening in the system.
Systemic work in individual therapy
You don't need to bring your family to session to work from a systemic perspective. In individual work, this lens is applied by exploring the systems you belong to and how they influence your current experience.
What role do you occupy in your family? What mandates have you inherited? How were emotions handled in your home? What was allowed and what was forbidden? These questions open layers of understanding that purely individual analysis can't reach.
The systemic perspective within an integrative approach
In my work, the systemic perspective functions as the context in which the other approaches sit. IFS works with inner parts; the systemic lens asks where those parts come from. EMDR processes traumatic experiences; the systemic lens places them in the relational network where they occurred. Gestalt works in the here and now; the systemic lens remembers that this "here and now" has history.
It's especially relevant in couples counselling, where the patterns of each system of origin meet, clash and negotiate within the current relationship.