Glossary
Marriage and Family Therapist Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential marriage and family therapist terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key marriage and family therapist vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in marriage and family therapist training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Attachment
- Emotional bonds.
- Differentiation
- Balancing closeness and independence.
- DSM-5
- Diagnostic manual.
- Duty to warn
- Obligation when someone is in danger.
- Emotionally focused therapy
- A couples therapy model.
- Enmeshment
- Overly close family boundaries.
- Family systems
- Seeing problems within relationships.
- Genogram
- A family tree showing patterns.
- Informed consent
- Agreement to treatment.
- Reframing
- Seeing a problem from a new angle.
- Structural therapy
- Changing family organization.
- Supervision
- Oversight by a licensed therapist.
- Telehealth
- Therapy by video.
- Treatment plan
- Goals for therapy.
- Triangulation
- Pulling a third person into conflict.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Marriage and Family Therapist practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Marriage and Family Therapist training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.