What’s My Job Here?

At some point in the work, most family therapists find themselves asking an important but unsettling question:

“What exactly is my job here?” “What am I doing with this family’?

It often arises not during high drama, but in the slow grind of stuckness. When the sessions feel murky. When the emotional climate is cool and distant and progress flat-lined. When you're showing up, holding space, tracking dynamics, and still walking away thinking:

“Am I actually doing anything?”

The slow slide into the system dynamics 

Without noticing it, many early & mid-career therapists begin to assume roles that stretch beyond systemic practice:

  • The fixer who tries to solve every problem before the family can tolerate discomfort

  • The rescuer who tries to shield children from parental patterns rather than working relationally

  • The arbiter of fairness, truth, or blame, especially when families hand you that role out of their own helplessness

  • The educator who offers interpretations & insight in the hope that the family will grasp the enlightenments and change

These positions are born from care and intense awareness of the suffering in the family. But they erode both systemic thinking and the capacity to facilitate change in the family. And they lead to one of the quietest threats to clinical effectiveness: role fatigue and therapist burnout .

Returning to systemic clarity really matters

Systemic therapists are not the centre of the change process. We are participant-observers, interrupters, reflectors, and amplifiers. When we drift into central roles, we stop facilitating change within the system, and start compensating for what’s missing.

This drift often signals something else:
You’re working too hard in the system, and not enough with the system.

The reflective questions that re-anchor us

In our Understanding & Building Expertise learning series, we encourage mid-career therapists to ask:

  • What roles are being projected onto me?

  • What roles am I unconsciously accepting or performing?

  • Am I assisting the family to avoid the hard conversation and the painful emotions by taking  too much responsibility myself?

  • Who’s doing the most “work” in the room and why?

These are not just self-care questions. They’re systemic-diagnostic tools.
They help you locate not only where the family is stuck, but where you might be stuck with them.

Recalibrating the therapist’s stance

Coming back to a grounded, systemic position ‘In and Outside’ the family might involve:

  • Naming the drift: Gently acknowledging in supervision or with colleagues when your stance has shifted from systemic therapist to saviour

  • Reclaiming the invitation: Instead of solving, beging to ask more precise, disrupting questions that return responsibility to the family system

  • Tracking your internal cues: Fatigue, resentment, or over-identification are often signs you’ve left your systemic role

As Hedges (2012) noted in his work on relational psychotherapy, the therapist's experience is part of the data. When we feel burdened or over-responsible, it often mirrors dynamics in the family that also need attention.

From fatigue to fluency

Therapist role fatigue isn’t a sign you’re failing.
It’s a sign you’ve gone offline from your own framework.

And often, the most powerful move is not another intervention, but a quiet, curious return to your role as systemic facilitator. To ask yourself again, with fresh eyes:

What’s my job here?
And what am I doing that someone else in the system needs to learn how to do for themselves?

 

What’s My Job Here?
Back to blog