Systemic-Relational Therapy focuses mainly on what happens within human relationships. A therapist with this approach focuses their attention on what happens between people: the focus is not only on the individual and their characteristics, but also and especially on their interactions, on the dynamics between people, on the communication process and on the way they perceive themselves and the reality around them. This approach is based on the “General Systems Theory” (L. von Bertalanffy, 1969, General Systems Theory), a well known theory broadly applied in several fields of knowledge (biology, engineering, psychology and psychiatry). The core concept of this theory is the one of “system”. Within a system any variation of an element influences and modifies the state of all the other elements within that system. From this perspective, every context can be considered as a system: a group of people interacting with each other connected by emotional bonds and relationships, for example a couple or a family. In spite of this relations the discomfort felt by a person is not seen as something “wrong” within the person but regarded as something that went wrong outside of them, in the relationships.

In order for me to provide the best care, sometimes I integrate the Systemic-Relational Therapy with Cognitive Behavioral techniques. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a widely used evidence-based treatment for improving emotional and psychological well-being and has its emphasis on the role of thinking in how we feel and how we behave. These techniques aim to uncover thinking distortions in order to achieve a change in behaviors and emotional states. Some examples of thinking distortions:

• Black and white thinking: this all-or-nothing thinking, causes a difficulty in focusing on the shades and nuances in between the two extremes, leading the person to perceive themselves and the world around them in a rigid way (either I am/do/have ALL or NOTHING); this thinking mistake doesn’t take into consideration the intricate complexity of our emotional, relational and social world. Examples: “Either I do my task perfectly or it will be a total waste of time”, “If I do not have success in my professional life, then my life will be a total failure”, “If I don’t get better soon, I will be depressed my whole life”;

• Emotional reasoning: thinking that something is true only because we “strongly feel” (in reality we believe) that it is that way. Examples: “I feel that nothing will ever change”, “I feel that I won’t be able to do it all”, “I feel that I am worthless”. “Feeling something” doesn’t necessarily mean it is true;

• Mind reading: believing we know what others feel and think, or thinking we know the reasons why people behave the way they do, without considering other possibilities. In particular this thinking distortion leads us to predict what someone thinks about us. Examples: “Even if he smiles at me, I know he doesn’t like me”, “I know she doesn’t think I can do it, even if she doesn’t tell me so”, “From the way my therapist looks at me, I know she thinks I am a desperate case”;

• Over-generalization: arriving to general conclusions starting from a single element/incident, moving away from the concrete situation and often using adverbs like “always” or “never”. Examples: “My mood is always constant”, “They always mistreat me”, “I never get some good sleep”;

• Filtering: focusing on a single negative detail and dwell only on that so that our vision of the reality becomes obscure, dark. Examples: “I feel better about the majority of the symptoms I was experiencing, but I still can’t sleep well, it’s all pointless”, “I am sad because I have a low grade in my evaluation (in which there are various high grades), so I did a terrible job”.