Your Family/Your Self: How to Analyze Your Family System to Understand Yourself, and Achieve More Satisfying Relationships with Your Loved Ones. - book reviews

Adolescence, Spring, 1998

Blevins reveals some of the powerful secrets of systemic family therapy: how the family is both the protector and the destroyer of mental health; how all your personal strengths and weaknesses were first formed when you were a child, playing your assigned role in a family system you were too young to understand; how to understand your family by drawing a genogram - a family tree that shows not only marriages and children, but also divorces, conflicts, closeness, deaths, occupations, and more; how to assess your role in your current family situation; how there is no such thing as an individual in a family (everyone is connected, all influencing each other all the time); and how you can make positive changes in your family even if none of the other members is interested in change.

Chapters include: systems and individuals, family roles, individual scripts, family rules, togetherness and separateness, generation to generation, family dances, and on being responsible for yourself.