Extended Family Systems
Terms
undefined, object
copy deck
- Genogram
- Track relationship processes and key triangles over the course of therapy
- The Therapy Triangle
- By staying detriangled (free of emotional entanglements) the family system and its members will calm down to the point where they can begin to work out solutions to their dilemmas
- Relationship Experiments
- To help family members become aware of systems processes and learn to recognize their own role in them, e.g., identify reciprocal relationships.
- Coaching
-
Less personal/emotionally involved.
To avoid taking over for patients or becoming embroiled in family triangles
The therapist asks process questions designed to help clients figure-out family emotional processes and their role in them
Goal to increase understanding, self-focus, and attain more functional attachments to key family members - Taking the "I" position
-
Taking a personal stance
Increases objectivity
Decreases anxiety/confrontation - Bowen's view pays special attention to
- ...family patterns and invluences extending over several generations within a family
- Bowen believes that current family problems...
- reflects unresolved issues in families of orgin (i.e., they tend to be unsettled and thus persist in ongoing patterns that span generations).
- Bowen view the family as:
-
-an emotional unit
-an interlocking network of relationships
-best understood when analyzed w/in a multi-generational framework - 8 interlocking theoretical concepts
-
1. Differentation of self
2. Triangles
3. Nuclear family emotional system
4. Family Progection Process
5. Emotional Cutoff
6. Multi-generational transmission process
7. Sibling Position
8. Societal regression - Differentation of self:
-
The degree to which one is able to avoid having his behavior automatically driven by emotion.
The degree to which one can separate emotionally from parents in growing up is the key. - Triangles:
-
The smallest stable relationship system.
The basic building block in a family's emotional or relational system.
A 3rd person is brought into the relationship in an effort to reduce tension. - Nuclear Family Emotional System
-
People choose mates w/ equivalent levels of differentation to their own.
Almost any family will have one child who is more vulnerable to fusion than the others, and thus likely to be triangulated into parental conflict.
Individual tend to repeat in their marital choices, and other significant relationships, patterns of relating learned in their family of orgin. - Family Projection Process
-
Poorly diferentiated parents selectt the object of their attention the most infantile of all their children (not related to age).
This process operates w/in the mother-father-child triangle. - Emotional Cutoff
-
Extreme emotional distancing inorder to break emotional ties.
Occurs most often in families in which there is a high level of anxiety and emotional dependence. - Multigenerational Transmission Process
- Severe dysfunction as the result of specific degrees of differentation transmitted over several generations (e.g., schizophrenia, chronic alcoholism...)
- Sibling Position
- Birth orderr. Says children develop certain fixed personality characteristics on the basis of their birth order. So, a marriage is apt to be more successful if the couple marries in relation to their birth order (e.g., first born marries a second born. Youngest marries an older child...)
- Family systems therapy, NO MATTER THE NATURE OF THE PRESENTING PROBLEM, is always governed by two basic goals:
-
1. Reduction from anxiety and relief from symptoms.
2. An increase in each participants level of differentation in order to improve adaptiveness. - Extended Family Systems session are apt to be...
- ...controlled and cerebral.