Structural Family Therapy
Terms
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- Joining
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Blending into the family to begin understanding family themes and family myths, to sense a family member's pain or being excluded or scapegoated, to distinguish which persons have open communication.
Helping obtain a picture of the family structure in operation - Mimesis
- Joining the family by imitating the manner, style, affective range, or content of its communications.
- Tracking
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Adopting symbols of the family's life gathered from members' communication (such as life themes, values, significant family events) and deliberately using them in conversations with the family.
Leading-by-following. - Enactment
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A staged effort to bring an outside family conflict into the session so that the family members can demonstrate how they deal with it.
The therapist can observe the sequence and begin to map-out a way to modify their interactions and create structural changes. - Reframing
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Changing the original meaning of an event or situation by placing it in a new context in which an equally plausible explanation is possible.
Allows the therapist to provide a more constructive perspective, thereby altering the way the event or situation is viewed.
Within the context of an enactment, the therapist first redefines a presenting problem. - Unbalancing
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Therapist takes sides to unbalance and realign the system.
The therapist joins and supports one individual or subsystem at the expense of others.
Ultimately, balance and fairness is achieved because the therapist sides in turn with various family members and subsystems. - What is the primary goal of Structural Therapy?
- To change the structure of the family system.
- Where does Minnuchin believe the IP's symptom is rooted?
- ..in dysfunctional family transactions
- The more rigid the family interactive pattern...
- ...the less likely the members will be able to negotiate differences
- What is an Open System?
- A system with a continuous information flow to and from the outside world.
- What is a Closed System?
- A system that has a limited flow of information to and from the outside world.
- What type of boundary causes enmeshment?
- Diffuse boundaries
- What type of boundary results in disengagement?
- A rigid boundary.
- Define alignment
- The way family members join together or oppose one another in carrying out a family activity.
- Triangulation is defined as an alignment in which...
- ...each parent demands the child ally with him/her against the other parent.
- What is a coalition?
- Alliances between specific family members against a third member.
- Minuchin views families as going through their life cycles....
- ...seeking to maintain a balance between stability and change.
- The more functional the family,
- the more open to change during periods of family transitions, and the more willing to modify its structure as changing conditions demand.
- What is the structural family therapist's primary goal (in the dysfunctional family)?
- Organizational changes, with the assumption that individual behavioral changes and symptom reduction will follow.
- What happens when the family's structure is transformed?
- The positions of its members are altered, and each person experiences changes as a result.
- What is the structural therapist's primary role?
- To be an instrument of change.