Chapter 15 part 2
Evidently, psychoeducational therapy approaches have recently played a significant role where they help to reduce the overall level of stress among the families through educating them. The education offered to the families have been shown to be important since it equips the family members with critical coping skills that enable then deal effectively with a particular disturbed member of the family or manage a troubled family relationship. There are other instances where the education is offered to families to prevent conflicts and at the same time equip members with vital skills that would help them manage their daily nonclinical situations.
A Psychoeducational program has been established to comprise of a combination of the educational psychology, cognitive behavior therapy in addition to systems theory. Psychoeducational efforts have recently been prominent in working with families whose members have been diagnosed with the severe mental disorder like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia where the therapists with a psychoeducational viewpoint will adopt a non-blaming stance and offer support and teaching the family empowering coping skills. Often, these therapists provide valuable guidelines aimed at eliminating the obstacles that might affect harmonious family living and at the same time lower the possibility of symptomatic relapse.
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Based on the reading, it is clear that psychoeducational therapy is a major factor in the modern society because it has considerably helped reduce the amount of stress among family members by equipping families with necessary knowledge on how to handle issues that might emerge in the family hence improving their overall wellbeing. The use of collaboration of the interdisciplinary team to manage patients with various conditions, disabilities and even trauma is critical since different members are involved to ensure that they share ideas to come up with a solution that would be accepted by everyone. When families are equipped with these skills, they stand a better chance to avoid and manage various issues that might have significantly affected the family and at the same time solve any conflict that could have threatened the existence of the family.
Chapter 10 Structural
Salvador Minuchin and his colleagues are believed to be the mind behind the structural approach in family therapy. Structural family theory explicitly focuses on the active, family unit’s organized wholeness in addition to various strategies that families tend to organize themselves via their transactional patterns. Different elements are studied in this concept including the family’s coalition, boundary, subsystem and even alignments. Further, there also exists the dysfunctional structure which focuses on the covert rules hence used to govern various forms of family structures believed to have become inoperative. In the modern day, the structural family therapies are strategically directed at the current transactions and at the same time offer higher priority to various actions rather than insight. For instance, an individual’s behavior like the patient’s symptoms is specifically considered within the family structure context.
Most of the structural interventions in most cases are highly active and well strategized; however, there are cases where manipulative efforts are used to alter the rigid or the unworkable structures. To achieve the required changes, a family will be helped to negotiate any outdated rule appropriately and at the same time seek greater boundary clarity. Therefore, when one succeeds in joining the family and at the same time accommodate to its style, then the structuralists will be able to acquire a foothold critical in assessing the way of dealing with problems of the members hence helping them change all their dysfunctional set while rearranging the family organization. Common types of therapeutic that are often employed to bring about a transformation of the family structure include enactments, boundary making, unbalancing and reframing.
The reading is highly informative and provides detailed information than one can use to restructure a family’s transactional rule through establishing proper boundaries between the subsystems and further strengthen the hierarchical order of the family. Further, when efficiently used, it is clear that a family problem might be resolved much efficiently using a well developed and focused strategic solution and which all also take into consideration various issues affecting that particular family.
Chapter 14, part 2: Solution Focused
It is clear that narrative therapists specifically direct their efforts at helping their clients to gain access to their most preferred story lines related to their identities and lives replacing the previous negative, self-defeating, dead-ended narratives concerning themselves. Arguably, the model has successfully gained massive prominence based on the poststructural thinking that seems to challenge the need for the deeper search for the primary truth and the need to repair underlying concrete structures. Further, the process of deconstructing all the old notions and at the same time replace them with multistoried capabilities greatly help in reducing the overall in lowering the power of dominating problem-saturated stories. The model specifically targets to eliminate the institutionalized cultural and the restrictive self-narratives that might affect an individual. Therapeutic conversations will, therefore, begin by critically externalizing a particular problem. To enable families to reclaim their lives from an identified problem, then the narrative therapy often takes the form of a question focusing on various alternate story line related to their future. The moment the client obtains a history of multiple problem-saturated narratives that had subjugated their lives; they start to establish a logic of several alternatives that involves realistic stories.
From the reading, one clearly understand that according to the narrative therapists, a client, in any case, is not an issue rather a crisis identified is the major predicament to be addressed. The model is important because it specifically focuses on a problem through externalizing it to understand various external factors that might be affecting the family and then solve the problem completely which will prevent the further related problem from emerging. When adopted, it can help to address children learning difficulties and even help in anger management among men.
Chapter 9: Experiential Model
Experiential family therapists’ attempts were specifically emphasizing actions over insight or interpretation, nontheoretical and nonhistorical fundamentally through offering growth-enhancing experience via family-therapist interactions. Some of the foremost practitioners associated with the model are Virginia Satir, Walter Kempler in addition to Carl Whitaker. Whitaker began redefining schizophrenic’s symptoms as the major sign of the arrested growth around 50 years ago and further continued his focus on the families to stress both the interpersonal and intrapsychic barriers to maturity and development. His model was specifically meant to bring about personal growth.
Kempler, on the other hand, is a Gestalt family therapy’s practitioner and specifically seem to focus on the moment-to-moment immediacy which is shared between the family members and the therapist and further guides’ individual to reach beyond their facades, customary self-deceptive games, and even defenses. Virginia Satir, on the other hand, is the most renowned family therapist. She specifically focused on the communication discrepancies between the members of the families with a humanistically oriented effort to construct self-esteem and self –worth among all members. Her model can thus help clients to gain access to their nourishing potential and at the same time people how to make use of them.
It is evident that this model is important in solving family and individual problems because it explicitly adopts the moment by moment emotional experiences. The exponential method is obviously one of the most efficient models to address family problems because it carefully confronts the challenges facing the members of the families and determines how their overall self-awareness might be blocked and at the same time help individual channel their awareness into a highly productive and fulfilling relationship among members. An individual in the family is thus helped to identify his or her potential that might redefine them for good and teach them how to apply them in real life.
Chapter 12: Milan Models
The behavioral model of family therapy tries to introduce the scientific method by developing frequently monitored, database intervention procedures. The model tends to lay much emphasize on the environmental, social and situation determinants of human behavior. The cognitive-behavioral therapist, therefore, tries as much to improve the positive interaction among members of the families while stressing on the significance of the self-regulation and self-direction in altering behavior. On the other hand, cognitive restructuring tries to modify the individual’s attribution, thoughts, and perceptions related to a given event. Cognitive and behavioral approaches have recently been employed widely in the conjoint treatment of sexual dysfunction, behavioral parent training, and behavioral couple’s therapy and even in the functional family therapy.
A proper assessment would demand that the following be carried out by the therapist: problem identification, progress measurement and validation of change. Behavioral couple therapy incorporates the major principles of both the social theory and social learning theory to teach clients ways to attain a positive reciprocity to achieve pleasing consequences in their relationship. Behavioral parent training tries to teach the parents about a behavioral doctrine of child management. The interventions adopted are directed at helping the families to acquire the new set of reinforcement contingencies to learn new behaviors. Conjoint sex therapy on the other entails both partners to alleviate various problems of sexual dysfunction effectively.
From the summary above, it is clear that cognitive and behavioral approaches are suitable for solving various problems including stress and conflicts in a relationship among couples. However, it is important for the partners to accept that they have a problem to be helped and benefit from this model. Further, parents can also benefit greatly from this model where they will acquire goo parenting skills. The technique might also be useful to the families with adolescents at-risk for drug abuse and delinquency.
Chapter 14, part 3: Collaborative Therapy
The collaborative therapy, a branch of narrative therapy, is attributed to David Epson and Michael White. The Collaborative therapy model is the important intervention where it gives the client an option to access the services of the “non-authoritarian" counselor, particularly for the clients who are not heteronormative, have gender dysphoria or are transgender, or those who have decided to live an alternative lifestyle. The model was employed by Anderson to manage both marriage and family therapy successfully hence was convinced that the method could also be important in helping families and partners to understand the client in a better way. It might be applied when patients feel that they are not able to adhere to the social norms like coming out openly as homosexuals or even transgender. The therapy is meant for adults and those who seem to suffer from dual diagnosis, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, chronic schizophrenia and even bipolar disorder.
Further, the model holds that clients often become subject to mental pain when applying oppressive stories that dominate one’s life. A problem often emerges when the way an individual’s lives is narrated by both other people and themselves fails to fit with their overall lived experiences. The intervention has however been criticized on the following grounds, first, in a situation where there is a severe lack of community-based rehabilitation programs, it might be challenging for the client to get the medical backup for the therapy hence making the intervention less effective. Secondly, in a case of the severe mental condition like schizophrenia, about 30 percent of the clients might have the poor long-term prognosis.
Based on the essay, it is clear that collaborative therapy is vital as a family therapy intervention because it can effectively help those individuals who suffer dual diagnosis, bipolar disorder, and chronic schizophrenia and continue to suffer in silent because they cannot access treatment and medication for their problem. The method can also be said to be suitable because the therapist adopts a flexible approach that allows the client to alter what he or she feels uncomfortable with.
Chapter 11: Strategic, Haley & Madanes
Communication theories have had a greater impact in the family therapy field through recasting the human issues as situational and interactional. The epistemology introduced by Bateson and Jackson apparently set a basement for the interactive therapeutic approach of the MRI, currently viewed as strategic family therapy. The method makes use of paradoxical techniques, or even therapeutic double binds to change the family rules and their relationship patterns. The interactional view of the MRI is exemplified by its Brief Therapy Center activities. In this case, the misguided solutions that are tried by the families the primary problems and at the same time, the interventions are directed at treating all the failed solutions through providing a new, therapist designed directives. Both Madanes and Haley tend to offer a version of the family therapy. Carefully planned tactics specifically direct the model in addition to the issuance of the directive to solve the family’s problems. For instance, Haley tends to employ the straightforward directives in addition to indirect paradoxical interventions to compel enthusiastic desertion of the dysfunctional behavior through family defying directions not to change. Madanes, on the other hand, seem to employ the paradoxical principle particularly in the form of ‘pretend’ technique aimed at attaining change without necessarily inviting any resistance.
The text is essential as it outlines the family problem intervention developed by Madanes and Haley. The method is also effective because it has been shown to employ the use of a carefully planned tactics and further issues the right directives targeting particular family problem. Further, it can be said that the approach tends to take a softer and a soothing method such as working with the members of the families where there exist oppositional behavior among children. It also allows that the members of the families in addition to the therapies engage and work towards solving a family problem identified effectively.
Chapter 13: Cognitive-Behavioral
The postmodern revolution in family therapy has been argued to have substantially challenged the system thinking particularly of the first-order cybernetic type. In the contemporary view, the objectively knowable universe does not exist rather; the concept of reality has become socially constructed. Today, the individual can create their realities as they try to live them. Such a view clearly enable the therapists to value the notion of diversity, and further one would agree that what comprises a functional family is precisely in the beholder’s eyes. Postmodern Revolution therapies take into consideration both constructivism and social constructionism. Constructivism significantly focuses on an individual’s perception limitation, and this is often based on the assumptions that one makes about other people. Constructionism, on the other hand, notes that the concept of reality is mediated through language and further, it is culturally and socially determined from individual’s experiences. Those therapists who hold onto the view of the social constructionist focus on the assumption that the family holds concerning the problem.
A client will be engaged in his or her past stories and search for the therapist for empowering strategies to view and resolve the problem. The postmodern-influenced therapist, therefore, seeks to engage the families in the most collaborative dialogues where language and meaning assigned to an event take the precedence over the behavioral sequence or even the family interactive patterns. The therapist further helps the client to find their new meaning in lives and then re-story the problems and then identify a workable solution. Typical examples of social constructionist family therapy include solution-oriented therapy, the collaborative approach, solution-focused brief therapy and even the reflecting team.
Based on this model, it can be said that it is effective since it takes into consideration ranges of factors among them including the family organization, culture, gender and even ethnicity to precisely determine the level of the family functioning. It might be successful because it focuses on the family’s assumption about the problem and then engages them in resolving the problem while equipping clients with skills to find a new meaning of their lives.
