I am currently done with college for the summer but will be taking research methods, cognitive psychology and history and systems of psychology next semester so I am bound to be learning something new soon. I came upon a lot of interesting information in my clinical psychology class last semester; such as hearing about marriage, family and child therapy because some other classes I took just covered general concepts of psychology from Freud, Rogers and so forth but not these exact therapies so much. Most forms of therapy have some version that can deal with children. In therapy children are different then adults because they rarely request psychotherapy and because they are still in a developmental process so it is more complicated for children the adults to rely on verbalization and self examination in therapy. Many child therapies use play rather then verbal activities that are more popular in adult therapy. Children can be treated for disorders such as phobias, anorexia, bulimia, schizophrenia, autism, depression, mental retardation, asthma, headaches, and the negative influences from child abuse or related traumas. Marital and couple therapists first assumption is that conflicts of the individuals in therapy come from the poor functioning of the people as a unit rather than just from emotions and personality issues within the individuals in couples therapy. This is why a lot of theorists view this type of therapy to be a subsystem of family therapy. Usually when a couple comes into therapy with issues each person feels threatened and in a defensive mode and sometimes will deal with this by blaming one another, mutual withdrawal and blaming themselves. This influences the situation where the couple is looking at the other person as the problem and not more willing to work together to solve issues. Couple therapists will try to first reduce threat, blame and defensiveness, create positive communication that helps the couple to work on mutual concerns and to start the process of actual problem solving. Couples therapy applies techniques to create effective communication to take the place of blame and fighting. And the couple therapist might focus on the exact nature of the conflict and the experience that comes along with it in therapy. One well known technique in couples therapy is known as mirroring between the couple where lets say the husband tells his story of an issue and the wife carefully listens, then the wife is asked to say exactly what she heard her husband say, then the husband is asked if he got what the wife said and if not he is asked to say it again, which can be a challenging task for some troubled couples. Most family therapies take the perspective of the family that it is a system. From this system perspective conflicts are looked at as reflections of poor functioning in the system as a whole. If a family system is having conflict the system may become closed to try to keep up with a type of static equilibrium in the family. For example if a issue comes up among a mom and dad a child may develop a physiological or psychological problem as a way to restore some balance in the family, which is done unconsciously by the child and is a response to pressures and strain occurring in the family. The child developing the issue may change the mom and dads attention from their problems which to some degree can positively restabilize the family system. Some family therapist think that families "need" their problems which means that to fix this circumstance through therapy the family needs to find a way to reorganize the whole family system in therapy so that the family does not feel like they "need" their problems for one reason or another. There are many different approaches that a therapist can use in family therapy and most of them are related to popular schools of therapy in up to date clinical psychology textbooks. I learned a lot in clinical psychology and I am hoping to learn more next semester in the classes I mentioned before about related topics to the specialization of clinical psychology.