Transgenerational family therapists strongly believe that a person’s current problems are related to issues in their family’s origin. (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2013) They focus on working with more than one generation of a family to resolve the families’ problems. Transgenerational family therapists are interested in how family generations create patterns of behavior so that they gather a better understanding of how certain problems within a family develop, in hopes to help the family change the behavior that causes those problems. One of the key components of transgenerational model is differentiation. Differentiation is the process in which the individuals in a family go through to define themselves “individually” within the family system.
