In a therapeutic culture still strongly shaped by medical and individualistic paradigms, Family Systems Therapy offers a counter-cultural perspective. Rather than understanding suffering primarily as a disorder located within one person, it asks: What relational patterns, family structures, cultural pressures, and unspoken conflicts are shaping this symptom?
Through vivid clinical stories, participants will explore how suffering is co-created, maintained, and transformed through everyday patterns of silence, conflict, avoidance, and connection. Rooted in structural family therapy, this workshop invites us to see diagnosis differently: not as destiny, but as a human message.
Instead of viewing depression, ADHD, or self-harm primarily as isolated disorders, Amy Begel invites us to understand symptoms as relational signals emerging within couples, families, and broader cultural contexts.
Referentin: Amy Begel is a family therapist who received her family therapy training over 30 years ago with one of the creators of structural family therapy, Dr. Salvador Minuchin. Since then, she has maintained a busy private practice in New York City. In addition to her clinical practice in family therapy, Amy is on the teaching faculty of both the Department of Family Practice, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Department of Internal Medicine and Cardiology at Maimonides Medical Center where she trains resident physicians in looking at relationship dynamics in the context of medical care.