This is an account of supervision of family therapy taking place at the same time, and in the same room, as the work with the family. We attempted this method of supervision because we did not have the facility of a one-way screen, yet we both had experienced the benefits which could be derived from that. However, what started off as a second-best method of supervision has become, decisively, a very fruitful way of working. It has a number of advantages over both supervision from behind a one-way screen, and co-therapy.I n order to distinguish the two r6les involved we will use the word 'therapist' to describe the person working directly with the family, and 'supervisor' to describe the person who sits back from the family-plustherapist system, and whose task is to enable the therapist to help the family. We alternate between these rdes with different families but will assume for easy usage, within this article, that the therapist is male and the supervisor is female.

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This paper explores some of the ways in which family therapy theory and practice limits an appreciation of the contexts of families and family therapists. It focuses particularly upon how the rules which underlie patterns of relationships in social systems are made and maintained more by one part of a system than by another, and considers this (a) within families, (b) within various aspects of the social environment of families, and (c) within the organizational contexts of family therapists. It then proposes that the systemic thinkingwhich family therapists apply to families is potentially applicable to wider contexts including international relationships.

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