Family Systems
LEVEL
Professional Development
AWARD
PCI College Certificate of Attendance
COURSE STATUS
Open for Applications
DURATION
1
day(s)
Full-Time
DELIVERY
Online
COMMENCEMENT DATE
17 Jan 2027
LOCATIONS
Online
We do not exist in isolation; we are shaped by the intricate, often invisible webs of our family history and dynamics.
This PCI College workshop offers a transformative lens through which to view human distress. By moving away from an exclusively individualistic focus and toward a systemic perspective, you will gain the ability to see how patterns, roles, and intergenerational traumas circulate through families. This course empowers you to help clients understand their place within their broader system, opening new pathways for healing that reach far beyond the individual therapy room.
Who is this course for?
This workshop is designed for counsellors, psychotherapists, and helping professionals who wish to expand their clinical repertoire to include systemic thinking.
- Counsellors & Therapists: Gain a vital systemic framework to better understand the contextual influences on client behaviour.
- Helping Professionals: Social workers, family support workers, and youth workers can better map the dynamics of the family units they serve.
- Students in Training: Build a foundational understanding of “systems thinking” early in your journey to become a more holistic practitioner.
- Existing Practitioners: Shift your perspective to identify how family “scripts” and dynamics may be playing out in current client challenges.
What are the benefits of doing this course?
This training transforms your clinical vision, allowing you to see the “bigger picture” and work with the often-hidden forces that influence your clients’ lives.
- Contextual Understanding: Move beyond diagnosing the individual to understanding the “symptom” as a reflection of the family system.
- Intergenerational Insight: Gain tools to explore how past family patterns continue to impact current behaviours and relationship choices.
- Clinical Versatility: Add systemic interventions, such as genogram work, to your toolkit, even when working with individuals.
- Refined Empathy: Develop a non-blaming, systemic stance that fosters compassion for all members of a client’s family system.
What will you learn?
The curriculum balances the essential theory of family systems with practical, observational, and mapping tools you can use immediately.
- Systemic Foundations: Core concepts such as homeostasis, boundaries, triangulation, and the importance of family roles.
- Genogram Work: Practical training in creating and interpreting genograms to map intergenerational patterns and family history.
- Family Dynamics: Exploring how communication styles, family secrets, and unspoken “rules” shape individual emotional health.
- Systemic Change: Understanding how changing one part of a family system can lead to shifts in the entire structure.
- Practical Application: Using case studies and mapping exercises to practice applying a systemic lens to your current clinical work.
Learning Outcomes
The Family Systems post graduate certificate program will invite you to consider several fundamental systemic concepts and skills that may inform your practice with individual clients or couples, young people and adolescents.
It will explore how the past influences the present, transgenerational patterns, characteristics of functional and dysfunctional families. Family cohesion and adaptability.
Informed practitioners will acknowledge many psychological issues begin early in life and stem from relationships within the family of origin, or the family one grows up in, even though these issues often surface later in life.
This program will focus on the idea that each family is a unique social system with its own structure and patterns of communication. The personalities of each family member, core beliefs and values, and the influence of extended family all interact to make up the dynamics of family. Each family member is profoundly impacted by the family system. As a result, a change in one member of the family will affect the family system and the other family members.
This program will enable and empower the learner to focus upon on making paradigm shifts among individual’s as family members so that they see themselves, each other, and their roles in more effective manners. Rather than just changing behaviours, the focus includes changing the unspoken rules of engagement between individuals whether they are in a family, social or occupational system.
Eligibility
This is a CPD workshop specifically designed for Counsellors & Psychotherapist or other helping professionals with therapeutic experience and students currently in professional training. BSc Counselling & Psychotherapy students in Years 1, 2, 3 and 4 of their studies are all invited to apply for this CPD workshop.
IT Skills
Students require sufficient IT skills to complete the course.
Additional Entry Requirements
Students can expect to be provided with advice and support concerning any learning difficulties that they may encounter. Any diagnosed learning difficulty, e.g. dyslexia, must be noted on the application.
Fees
Standard Rate: Applies to all non-affiliated participants.
PCI College Graduate: Discounted rate available for graduates of BSc Degree and Postgraduate programmes.
Current BSc/MSc Students & Alumni Members: Preferential rate available. Join our Alumni Group on LinkedIn to access this discount
Course Fees – Republic of Ireland
Course Total