A lot of husbands and wives go through marital issues that they don't know how to deal with. In fact there are more adults going through relationship problems that they require help dealing with than there are persons suffering from a lot of psychological problems that are familiar in our society today.

In our culture, marriage is an essential part of a lot of peoples everyday lives. Challenges and issues which the couple is not able to handle on their own can easily result in misery and separation. When couples are not happy it also impacts their families and other people they are in contact with negatively. By using a family systems approach to marital counseling, pastors or counselors can help these couples fix their conflicts or emotional issues.

Family systems approach is also referred to as Bowen theory. Murray Bowen, MD was a psychiatrist and the person who designed this theory of human behavior. The Bowen theory has the potential to change the approach to treatment from focusing on one person to focusing on the family as a whole, as well as on the society as a whole.

The family systems approach is the foundation of family counseling. A concept of family counseling is that a person's behavior is influenced by their environment and also affects their environment, including the person's family. So rather than focusing on one individual person, the center of attention is shifted to the whole family. However family systems counseling can be given to just one individual person. It is not the number of individuals going to therapy that is labeling the therapy technique, but instead what the primary focus of the therapy model is. Actually most of the time one individual that desires to change how the family dynamics is working out is attending counseling.

Each family has their own set of spoken and unspoken rules. These rules gradually change over time as the family members and their desires change.

In every family certain behavioral patterns are frequently found and the members of the family usually play certain roles. These behaviors are commonly repeated in a cyclic pattern, again and again, until one of the persons in the family is made aware of what is happening and decides that he/she wants to change so the relationship can be healed. One example of such a cyclic behavioral pattern is a family where one family member is nagging and the other is withdrawing. When one of the members of the family are nagging, the other person is responding with withdrawing, this will cause the other person to keep nagging and the other person will just withdraw even more. It does not make any difference who started the behavioral pattern, there is no point in blaming one or the other, but when one person changes their behavior, the whole family dynamic will change.