The Future of Family Therapy in Australia

Leonie White
6 days ago
5 min read

At the 2025 Australian Association of Family Therapy Conference “Healing and Reconnecting”, I had the privilege of being an invited Keynote Speaker on a Professional Panel “Healing and Reconnecting: Contemporary Systemic Perspectives.” I was delighted to have the opportunity to share my thoughts regarding the future of Family Therapy in Australia, and to engage in dialogue with my fellow Panel members, Sonja Baram and Prof Paul Rhodes, as well as Catherine Falco who facilitated the discussion. And in true dialogical style, we opened the discussion up to the conference attendees.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Family Therapy in Australia and future possibilities, and so I wanted to share my thoughts from the conference as a means of sparking further ideas and conversation amongst the Family Therapy Community. As the saying goes, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, so I invite you all to think about what’s possible and what role, however big or small, you might play in the future of Family Therapy.

In the midst of the moment on the Panel, I definitely didn’t stick 100% to my notes, but here they are for you 😊

Hello everyone. I am Leonie, and I am delighted to be invited to share my thoughts on “Contemporary Systemic Perspectives” and to consider the future of family therapy in Australia.

Idea 1:

I’d like to start, if I can, by sharing a story. Last week, I caught up with a colleague, and we were talking about all things family therapy. When I was chatting to him about my ideas for the panel, he let me know that it reminded him of an experience he’d had – he shared a story with me about how he was in a group of people who were taken on a trip into a rainforest by an Aboriginal Elder. Part of this trip involved learning how to navigate their way in the rainforest. My friend let me know it was really easy to get turned around in the forest and lose your way, and the advice was that you should stop every 50 steps and look back at where you had come from to orient yourself…that looking back was the best way to go forward.

The wisdom in this story really struck a chord with me, especially in terms of how I see family therapy moving forward.

There are many different ways to think about Contemporary Family Therapy.

For me, one direction that is exciting is systemic integrative practice – integrating different approaches and different knowledge paradigms within a systemic family therapy framework to provide individualised, tailored, intentional services for each individual, couple, family, stakeholder group or organisation we work with.

But you see, we have to be able to look back to move forward in this systemic integrative direction. I believe that integrative practice requires a solid understanding of the foundations – systems thinking – and applications of systems thinking in different family therapy approaches, including classic approaches. I believe you need to know how and why something works in order to enter into the spirit of creativity, playfulness, and maybe even irreverence needed to combine ideas, understandings and approaches, and to thoughtfully and effectively engage in systemic integrative practice.

You have to get really clear on what you are doing, and how different knowledge paradigms and approaches, for example, neuroscience, mentalisation, cognitive, or psychodynamic psychotherapy and systemic thinking fit together… or not…and for what purpose…you have to think about how your ride up in the systems thinking helicopter is shaping your overall approach and how it fits with the people you are working with.

That’s a key to intentional practice.

So, in a sense, being contemporary means combining systems thinking, classic approaches from the past and contemporary understandings while having a solid systemic framework to organise your thinking and collaborative decision-making.

This also requires nailing “the basics” that aren’t always so basic – By basics, I mean your way of being and the multiple aspects of therapeutic alliance. Technique matters in combining approaches, but it can also invite a focus on learning more and more “techniques” rather than focusing on the therapist’s way of being, human-to-human connections and interactions, and quality of therapeutic alliance …the things that common factors and meta models point to as needing to come first and foremost.

And of course, privileging diversity in people, approaches and ways of thinking and being is essential.

Idea 2:

The other key idea I’d like to share in my thinking about Contemporary Family Therapy is the importance of growing our Family Therapy Community and growing Family Therapy in Australia. I believe we need to grow in numbers and presence.

This is one of the reasons I’ve remained committed to providing AAFT-accredited training in Queensland to support people on their pathway to become Clinical Members of AAFT.

I am also committed to providing professional development as an accessible option for a range of professionals. I would love as many professionals as possible to be exposed to and develop skills in systemic thinking and practice, even if going down the road of Clinical Memberships isn’t for them.

Growing Family Therapy in Australia, I think, will need more than just growing our community of professionals, though. I believe we have to increase the awareness and understanding of Systemic Thinking and Family Therapy across other services outside the helping professions. Here’s one example from my work: I bring together understandings from Trauma-Informed Care, Neuroscience, Attachment and Systemic Family Therapy to support schools in building relationships with students and parents and to increase student wellbeing and academic resilience. Education settings are a fantastic place to bring systemic thinking and practice, as are many other settings.

I also think it’s important to bring Family Therapy to the general public.

In how many homes around Australia do you think people know what systemic family therapy is and how it can help? At a backyard BBQ, if you told someone you were a Family Therapist, would they know all of what that entails and means?

How often, if ever, do you see family therapy in popular media? My guess is not nearly as much as we might like, and that it would be great to raise the profile of family therapy. This matters because everyone can benefit from systemic thinking. And not just humans but the living world itself.

To do this, though, we each have to play a part and play to our strengths. But even small steps matter, e.g., talking to colleagues, bringing awareness of family therapy into your workplace, sharing family therapy resources, sharing the AAFT find a therapist page…. They all make a difference.

And so my invitation to all of you is to think about:

Where would you like family therapy to go in Australia’s future?

And what can you do to spread, or sprinkle, family therapy a little further outside the therapy/consulting space?