These models developed over time to facilitate the management of age-old conflicts and modern concerns in the face of rapidly changing responsibilities of counseling practitioners. From the exposition of the five models and supporting research findings, the framework of marriage and family counseling may, therefore, be viewed as an aggregation of elements having specific applications to various issues for the purpose of keeping the family intact and functional as one, happy, cohesive social unit.

“Happy families are all alike. every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” goes a popularly quoted line from the opening of a classic novel Anna Karenina (Tolstoy, trans. 2003). The quotation serves a significant and fitting introduction to an academic paper that tackles the framework of marriage and family counseling. From prose to reality, most counselors would concur with Tolstoy and with me that, indeed, “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” owing to individual differences and a whole lot of factors. However, families may seek assistance from marriage and family counseling practitioners to guide them either in the context of individual or group sessions to assuage issues.

The fact that families are different and unique have given way to the establishment of a host of techniques, strategies, and models to facilitate counseling efforts and either bring back or continue on with happy family living. This paper tackles a review of existing literature on the framework of marriage and family counseling by going over both time-tested and newer models used by counselors in their practice. A combination of academic texts and peer-reviewed journals provided rich sources of materials for this paper.