Family Systems
Terms
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- Ordeal
- a paradoxical intervention in which client is directed to do something that is more of hardship than symptom
- MRI
- Families make common-sense but misguided attempts to solve their problems. The solution selection as well as its success is governed by system rules. The attempts go awry and the result is a positive feedback loop that makes the problem worse. What do you do? Three steps: (1.) identify the feedback loop, (2.) find the rules governing it, and (3.) change the loops and rules.
- First-order change
- a superficial change in a system that stays invariant
- General systems theory
- a biological model of living systems as whole entities that maintain themselves through continuous input/output from environment
- Disengagement
- Rigid boundaries that permit little contact with outside systems. Leaving people independent but isolated. It fosters autonomy but limits affection/nurturing.
- boundaries
- Emotional barriers that protect the autonomy and functioning of individuals and subsystems
- Differentiation of self
- Psychological separation of intellect and emotions and independence of self from others; opposite of fusion.
- Theory of social exchange
- Thibaut and Kelley's I theory according to which people strive to maximize rewards and minimize costs in relationships.
- Premack principle
- a principle that a preferred activity can be used to reinforce an unpreferred activity
- scapegoat
- person on whom blame is placed for faults of others
- Not-knowing
- Anderson and Goolishian's term for approaching families with as few preconceptions as possible.
- enmeshment
- a reference to families in which members are overly concerned and overly involved in each other's lives. Boundaries are highly permeable
- Michael White
- Narrative; 'the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem'; 're-authoring' the dominant stories of people's lives; and the idea of 'double-listening' to accounts of trauma: not only the accounts of trauma itself, but how people have responded to trauma.
- Jay Haley
- (strategic therapy, communications) experimenting with possible solutions (in a manner sometimes inspired by the therapist and sometimes inspired by the client), review of the results and informed resumption of experimentation until the goal of therapy is achieved. (1) that families often perpetuate problems by their own actions (2) that directives tailored to the needs of a particular family can sometimes bring about sudden and decisive change
- Don Jackson
- Systems theory; founded MRI; created family systems therapy
- Betty Carter
- Feminist, Bowen theory
- metacommunication
- the covert messages within language that show how individuals relate to each other in terms of power
- Undifferentiated family ego mass
- Bowen's early term for emotional "stuck-togetherness" or fusion in the family, especially prominent in schizophrenic families
- Reflecting team
- Tom Andersen's technique of having the observing team share their reactions with the family at the end of a session
- triangle
- A three-person system; according to Bowen, the smallest stable unit of human relations.
- George Kelly
- Personal Construct Psychology. investigative technique, which would remove the influence of the observer's frame of reference on what was observed. he believed (personal construct theory) our personality consists of our thoughts about ourselves, including our biases, errors, mistakes, and false conclusions
- Schemas
- Frameworks for our knowledge about people, objects, events, and actions that allow us to organize and interpret information about our world
- Equifinality
- the ability of a system to arrive at the same destination from different paths or conditions
- Steve de Shazer
- (solution focused therapy)
- Cross-generational coalition
- an inappropriate alliance between a parent and child who side together against a third member of the family.
- Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy
- (Contextual therapy, intergenerational, relational ethics) the relational ethics - of close relationships: in particular, the roles of caring, connectedness, loyalty, guilt, fairness, accountability, and trustworthiness - within and between generations. Meet needs in context, consequences, beneficial and destructive motivation.
- coalition
- an alliance between two persons or social units against a third
- Family sculpting
- technique in which family members are molded during the session into positions symbolizing their actual relationships to each other as seen by one or more members of the family
- cybernetics
- the study of feedback mechanisms in self-regulating systems
- Double bind
- A conflict is created when a person receives contradictory messages on different levels of abstraction in important relationship and can't leave or comment.
- Circular causality
- the idea that events are related through series of interacting loops/repeating cycles
- Susan Johnson
- (Emotionally focused therapy, attachment theory); short term therapy
- Fusion
- blurring of psychological boundaries between self and others and a contamination of emotional and intellectual functioning; opposite of differentiation
- mystification
- This term was borrowed from Marx and is applied to the "politics of families." Many families distort their children's experiences by denying or relabeling them. This helps to maintain the status quo and causes the child to become inauthentic.
- Externalization
- a technique that involves the truly radical reconstruction of defining problems not as properties of persons who suffer them but as alien oppressors
- Feedback loops
- return of portion of output of a system, especially when used to maintain output within predetermined limits (negative feedback) or to signal a need to modify system (positive feedback)
- Murray Bowen
- (Systems theory, intergenerational) differentiation of self, triangles, genorgams. Emotional cutoff
- Family homeostasis
- The tendency of families to resist change to maintain steady state.
- Family myths
- A set of beliefs on a distortion of historical reality and shared by all family members that help shape the rules of governing family functioning
- Paul Walzlawick
- (Brief therapy, systems theory); communication theory,
- Carl Whitaker
- psychoanalytic
- Unique outcomes
- Michael White's term for times when clients acted free of their problems, even if they were unaware of doing so. Narrative therapists identify unique outcomes as a way to help clients challenge negative views of themselves
- Second order change
- change that is multidimensional, multilevel, discontinuous and radical
- Salvador Minuchin
- Structural; charting the relationships between family members, or between subsets of family. These charts represent power dynamics as well as the boundaries between different subsystems
- Virginia Satir
- (communications, experiential, conjoint and co-therapy) Change Process Model. the "presenting issue" or surface problem. Effects of low self esteem in relationships
- Nathan Ackerman
- chief psychiatrist at the Menninger Child Guidance Clinic. attempt to integrate insights from individual psychotherapy with the then newer ideas from systems theory. Psychodynamic approach.
- Paradox intervention
- The therapist directs family members to continue their symptomatic behavior. If they conform they admit control and expose secondary gain, and if they rebel, they give up their symptoms
- Gregory Bateson
- "double bind" (cybernetics, systems theory)
- Milton Erickson
- (hypnotherapy, strategic therapy, brief therapy) focus on unconscious.