The Family therapy includes psychological counseling that helps the family members enhance their communication and resolve any existing conflicts. The therapy is often administered by a licensed therapist, psychologist, or clinical social worker. The objectives of family therapy could be the exploration of the family's interactional dynamics and their relationship to psychopathy. In other cases, the process aims to enhance communication, resolve family issues or problems enhance the functioning in the home environment, address exceptional family cases, and restoring excellent understanding among the family members. Family-based interventions use activities to build support for the family and offer the necessary health education (Carr, 2019). When addressing family issues, the family is viewed as an emotional unit, and its evaluation is based on how the different parts of the family contribute behaviors of the members and the function of the whole unit.
The Rosshut Agency and its Mandate
The Rosshut agency, located at 80 Fifth Avenue, New York, is an organization commissioned to provide psychotherapy services to the residents and visitors of New York City. The agency services clients of all ages regardless of their race, gender, and other walks of life. The agency aims at helping individuals struggling with stress, losses, and life's setbacks to discover themselves. The counseling provided by the company aims to provide such clients with the space and opportunity of examining and clarifying their emotions and thoughts as well as determining their best way forward in life. At Rosshut, trained therapists leverage the benefits of cutting-edge skills that help clients to release any fears or unconscious blocks. Clients are allowed to ask questions during the sessions, choose to focus on particular issues, uncover obstacles, and support what could not be working in their lives. The agency aims at helping clients to understand themselves better through consistent and ongoing discussions that contribute towards the clients' personal growth and progress.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Client System
The client in the case is Mr. John Williams, and the client system comprises the following members, John's wife Nancy, their three children Adrian, Chloe, and Millicent, who are aged 3, 7, and 12 years respectively. They were referred by their family doctor, Dr. Schlupp Burke, after the incident where Millicent had burnt the hand of her brother Adrian with the hot water from the dispenser.
The Case Situation
John was the only child and was raised in a dysfunctional family in which both his parents were absentee because of their heroin addiction. He lacked the parental love and care from his biological parents and eventually was taken away by his grandmother when her mother opted to go into a rehabilitation facility with the goal of recovery from addiction. John lived with his parents later when in high school for two years after his mother substantially recovered from the addiction and had been released from the facility. Being an only child, he does not have much information on sibling rivalry as he did not have any biological or foster siblings that he lived with. In this case, his children always fighting for things such as toys, and their parents’ attention are a strange scenario for him.
Nancy, John's wife, was raised in a large family with three siblings two sisters and a brother. When growing up, she lived with her mother, a critical care nurse in a state health facility, and his father, a high school principal. Unlike her husband, she is a little familiar with sibling rivalry. She is the second born in her family and has memories of fights with her elder brother at their young age. In Nancy's case, the rivalry ended with their childhood and no longer exists between her and her brother now that they are grown up with everyone having their immediate families to look after.
The rivalry among Adrian, Chloe, and Millicent, the three biological children of John and Nancy, is why they seek psychotherapy services at Rosshut Agency. There have been unending physical fights between the children for the past two years. These fights seem to intensify as the children age. Additionally, the children keep forming different alliances depending on their interests at the time. For instance, when Adrian and Millicent gang up against Chloe, Chloe, and Adrian against Millicent in other cases, Millicent and Chloe gang up against Adrian, whether it is at the times of verbal arguments or physical fights. Chloe, the second born of the three, has been showing increasing aggressiveness and thus picking up frequent fights with her elder sister Millicent who always wants to establish her position as the eldest in the family. The three children often fight over personal items such as clothing, utensils to use, and stationery. These children also frequently start frequent battles and arguments about spending time and getting attention from their parents. The parents, John and Nancy, are at a loss and have sought counseling services when they felt matters were getting out of hand. Recently, Millicent, who disabled the child lock option on the water dispenser, tricked Adrian to place his hand below the tap and burnet him with hot water. The incident prompted the parents to seek medical attention for Adrian and, in the process, ask for help on how to resolve the increasing rivalry among their children. In a nutshell, the children's rivalry is characterized by increased adverse effects, aggression toward each other, competition for parental affection and attention.
The Rosshut Agency and the Case of Sibling Rivalry
The agency is promised on the belief that everyone could benefit from psychotherapy services. The agency is best suited to handle the case of Nancy and John with their three children for its experience in handling family and group cases successfully. The agency's diversification of services that includes therapy for couples, individuals, family, child, and adolescents coupled with the provision for teletherapy fits well within the context of the current case of sibling rivalry. The company is well known in the care of family therapy for the many clients who testify the sessions by the agency helped them enhance their family communication, increase empathy for none another, resolve conflicts and create sustainable tools, patterns, or dynamics. The agency caters to people with struggles in life. People struggling to find and maintain healthy relationships get the chance to reconsider past and current relationships. The therapy helps them decipher ways that could be sabotaging the platonic, familial, and romantic relationships. Clients feeling lackluster regardless of how well things seem on the outside could leverage the psychotherapy of the agency to uncover their passions and rediscover meaning. The agency also helps people with the illness address underlying emotions or stress that could be exacerbating their illnesses.
Preparation Issues/Decision
The initial steps of preparation for the therapy process will include deciding on the issues to address and whom to address the issues with. The first session will be for the whole family first to establish critical issues of the cases. The parents will have the chance to describe the situation in their own words with examples of experiences. The children, too, will talk about their perspectives on the history of the issue. Every one of the five members of the client system will discuss their perspective of the problem. Additionally, the therapist will practice refraining from becoming the referee instead; the counselor will focus on gathering information to learn the perceptions of different members of the client system (Wojciak & Gamboni, 2020). The therapist will also review ways of helping the family build insight, heal any historical pains, foster healthy foster communications, and create a safe environment for all family members.
The individual session will follow with each family member, starting with the youngest child Adrian. The individual sessions would establish the problem and any historical places of pain or hurt within the family. The client system members will be queried on communication, feelings of safety, and how the family compensates for unhealthy habits and behaviors. Children will be asked about their expectations from their parents and siblings and whether they feel disappointed on not. When it comes to the individual sessions for parents, there will be additional inquiries on several other aspects of the family. John and Nancy will be asked how they enforce consequences and rules in the family. They will be asked to describe any existing family routine times used to meet the needs of family members. The other area to explore as a way of preparation will be on how or whether the parents intervene in solving their children's squabbles (Minuchin, 2018). Parents will also narrate cases of separation of the children and cases of compromise regarding how they treat children equally.
Engagement Techniques
The engagement between the therapist and the members of the client system will involve several techniques with necessary tailoring on a need basis. The techniques will primarily be premised on the systems theory and emotionally focused family therapy. The therapist will use the techniques to understand the negative and positive patterns currently existing and promoted in the family. The therapist will endeavor to meet the family at their level, plan the sessions and activities with the family members, focus on the client system members' strengths and skills, develop mutually acceptable goals, and deliver relevant and beneficial services to John's family. The techniques will also help identify the dysfunction and distress within the family, identifying the negative cycles in communication, any unhealthy alliances, unresolved hurt, and any existent power struggles (Sundaraja & Shah, 2017). The therapist will use the following techniques:
Helping the family identify strong emotions, for instance, fear, shame, self-blame, and anger, could be blocking any possibility of resolution of existing issues effective communication.
Seeking to deepen the insight into the reactions and behaviors to check aggressive reactions and inflammatory.
The therapist will also support the client system members in identifying the unhealthy patterns of power or control and replacing behavioral patterns.
The therapist will also use psych education to help the family check any existing circumstances of the family in the areas of parenting strategies and plan for the future and developmental stages of family members.
Problem and Goal Specification
Some of the difficult circumstances in the current case include the evolving need, the client's system, the differences in the individual temperaments, the unique needs, and the role models of the children involved in the case. It could be challenging to pinpoint the natural causes of the sibling rivalry, leading to the flares of bickering and squabbles among the three siblings. The tricky part would be getting the members to identify the issues for themselves and follow the therapist's guide to finding solutions to their issues. It will be challenging to determine each member's anxieties and identities, for instance, changes in how protective they are for belongings and toys. The inconsistency in patterns of which the children respond to fighting over items, such as based on their like of the item or out of jealousy, could be difficult for the members to identify. It will be crucial to check the temperaments of the parents and children, such as disposition, adaptability, and mood of each member and how they contribute to the rivalry.
Assessment of Family Functioning
The assessment will check the John and Nancy family's structural and social aspects, including the relationships and interactions within the family. It checks levels of cohesion, conflict, quality of communication, organization, and adaptability within the family. The assessment of inner systems will include the interests, viewpoints, and perspectives of the family. On the other hand, the outer system of the family assessment will include checking the interests of outside family friends and relatives in the family. The therapist will assess processes for the family that are in place in achieving its objectives. It will also include checking any external persons or viewpoints. The therapists will conduct an assessment of the family functioning using a genogram and an Eco map. The genogram will include details of names, Adrian, Millicent, and Chloe, their birth order, gender, and their relationships within the family in this case, siblings such as sister, and brother with their relationships with John and Nancy, such father, mother, daughter, and son. The genogram will be a tool for detecting recurring family patterns within the family history and guiding the client system members to understand their problem (Hernandez et al., 2019). The therapist will assess the understanding of each member of the family on family expectations, role performance, and their effective involvement. The assessment will also show how much each member is interested in each other and the control process.
Intervention Strategies
The therapists will use silence appropriately, rephrase and paraphrase issues and questions, apply reflection within the process, and summarize and acknowledge as critical ways to lay the foundation of intervention. The strategies will be varied based on the determined needs. The therapist will use mediated, gentle, and supportive meetings to support the members of the client system throughout the psychotherapy process. The other strategies to be used are addressing behavioral issues. The therapists will use immediate behavior reinforcement, positive rein enforcement, and time-limited activities, especially for the three children, to help them identify problems in their behaviors and the best ways to change. The strategy could prove challenging to address reactionary behaviors, but the end outcomes are vital for growth and safety.
Considering the trauma some of the family members like Nancy and Adrian could be experiencing, the therapists will assess and employ the strategy of supporting them to process the extreme situations or events that have happened before. It will help the concerned persons to acquire a clear perspective and support for recovery. The therapist will also use positive psychology intervention by helping the members of lead a more fulfilled life. Additionally, the therapist could employ other therapeutic ideas in many sorts of ways. Some of the ideas include dance or movement, drama, laughter and music therapy, and hypnotherapy. The music will help manage emotion with positive implications, while hypnotherapy will help correct behavioral dysfunctions and anxiety. Drama therapy promotes positive mental health, and laughter therapy will increase trust.
References
Carr, A. (2019). Family therapy and systemic interventions for child‐focused problems: The current evidence base. Journal of Family Therapy, 41(2) , 153-213.https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6427.12226.
Hernandez et al. (2019). Family Intervention: How to Build Collaboration between the Family and School Using Conjoint Family Counseling. School-Based Family Counseling, 68-118.
Minuchin, S. (2018). Families and family therapy. Routledge.
Sundaraja, C. S., & Shah, A. (2017). One father, many mothers: Sibling relationships in polygamous families. How to work with middle-aged siblings: Integration of narrative-behavioral approaches in family therapy , 76-91.https://doi.org/10.1080/08975353.2017.1279885.
Wojciak, A. S., & Gamboni, C. (2020). Prevention and Treatment of Problems with Sibling Relationships. The Handbook of Systemic Family Therapy, 2, 141-162.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119438519.ch39.
