First published in 1988, behavioural family therapists worked in an area that had greatly changed since its inception over 20 years before. Growing out of the pioneering work of Gerald Patterson, Robert Paul Liberman, and Richard Stuart, whose backgrounds vary from psychology to psychiatry to social work, behavioural family therapy (BFT) had evolved to encompass systems theory, considerations of the therapeutic alliance, as well as approaches to accounting for and restructuring family members' subjective experiences through cognitive strategies.