MILAN SYSTEMIC
This core Milan technique involves asking family members to comment on the relationships, differences, or behaviors of other family members to highlight systemic patterns.
What is Circular Questioning?
This term describes the invisible barriers that regulate contact and flow of information between family members or subsystems. They can be rigid, clear, or diffuse.
What are Boundaries?
These are tasks or instructions given by the therapist for the family to perform outside of session, designed to alter behavior patterns directly.
What are Directives?
The family's misguided attempts to resolve the issue actually keep it alive.
What is the "attempted solution"?
Two people doing the same thing in the relationship is called:
Symmetrical Relationship
Reframes a family's symptomatic behavior as a well-intentioned effort to maintain the stability and cohesion of the system.
What is Positive Connotation?
In this structural intervention, the therapist prompts the family to physically act out their conflict in the session rather than just talking about it.
What is an Enactment?
In this type of directive, the therapist instructs the client to do more of the symptom (e.g., telling an anxious client to schedule 30 minutes of worry time).
What is a Paradoxical Intervention? (Also accepted: Prescribing the Symptom).
Refers to superficial behavioral changes within an existing system that do not alter the fundamental rules of the system.
What is First-Order Change?
In couples therapy, you should consider how you will handle information that one person tells you that the other person did not reveal. This may be referred to as a:
What is "No Secrets Policy"
To disrupt covert parent-child coalitions, this highly structured intervention requires parents to mysteriously go out together without telling their children where they are going.
What is the Invariant Prescription?
This term describes a highly dysfunctional boundary pattern where family members are over-involved in each other's lives, leading to a loss of individual autonomy.
What is Enmeshment?
This strategic technique involves making the symptom so difficult, tedious, or unpleasant to perform that the client chooses to abandon it.
What is an Ordeal? (Or Ordeal Therapy).
This MRI concept refers to a fundamental shift in the rules, structure, or organization of the system itself, resolving the problem at its root.
What is Second-Order Change?
The family systems approaches were a radical shift and deviation from existing:
This term describes the therapist's stance of non-judgmental curiosity, ensuring they do not align with any single family member or favor a specific outcome.
What is Neutrality?
When two family members (often parents) bypass their own conflict by focusing entirely on a child, the child is said to be experiencing this structural phenomenon.
What is Triangulation? (Also accepted: Detriangulation as the intervention).
Developed by Cloe Madanes, this intervention asks the client to intentionally act out their symptom (like a tantrum) while the family responds, exposing the symptom as a voluntary behavior.
What is the Pretend Technique?
This cognitive MRI intervention changes the conceptual or emotional viewpoint of a situation, placing it in a new "frame" that alters its meaning (e.g., viewing a child's "stubbornness" as "determination").
What is Reframing?
In the approaches we have covered so far, the ____ is the expert in the room.
What is the Therapist?
Milan therapists use this term to describe the highly manipulative, covert, and multi-generational power struggles often found in severely dysfunctional or psychosomatic families. Hint: "Not clean"
What is "The Dirty Game"
This structural intervention involves the therapist temporarily aligning with a lower-power subsystem (like a scapegoated child) to disrupt a rigid, dysfunctional hierarchy.
What is Unbalancing?
This desired outcome is achieved when a therapist helps parents work together as a team, successfully putting them back in charge of the household and ending the child's rule over the family.
What is restoring the parental hierarchy (or parental alignment/coalition)?
This communication trap involves a primary command, a secondary conflicting command (usually non-verbal), and a third command that prevents the victim from escaping or commenting on the contradiction.
What is a Double Bind?
Observable communication dynamics are the focus of the theories we have covered so far rather than ________.
What are "unconscious" processes?