one of the reasons family therapy can be difficult is that families often appear as collections of individuals who affect each other in powerful but unpredictable ways. Structural family therapy offers a framework that brings order and meaning to those transactions. The consistent patterns of family behavior are what allow us to consider that they have a structure, although, of course, only in a functional sense. The boundaries and coalitions that make up a family’s structure are abstractions; nevertheless, using the concept of family structure enables therapists to intervene in a systematic and organized way.