Systems Thinking Foundations
What is interdependence?
The idea that elements of a system mutually influence one another rather than operating independently.
Who is Murray Bowen and what did he study?
The founder of Bowen Family Therapy and a trained psychiatrist who studied schizophrenia.
What is a genogram?
A visual mapping tool used to trace family patterns, relationships, and significant events.
Who is the developer of Structural Family Therapy who focused on working with chaotic families?
Salvador Minuchin
What is joining?
The process of building a therapeutic alliance by adapting to the family’s interactional style.
What is reciprocal causality?
A systems concept emphasizing circular patterns rather than linear cause-and-effect explanations.
What is differentiation of self?
The lifelong process of balancing autonomy and connection within the family emotional system.
What is the therapist as a differentiated individual?
The therapist’s role of remaining calm and emotionally neutral to avoid being pulled into family triangles.
What is family structure?
The invisible set of functional demands that organize how family members interact.
What is an enactment?
A technique where the therapist asks family members to demonstrate their conflict in session.
What is a present-centered, process-focused approach?
This systems principle emphasizes focusing on what is happening in relationships rather than why it happened.
What is triangulation?
The tendency for family members to manage anxiety by involving a third party to stabilize a dyad.
What are “I” statements?
A communication strategy that emphasizes responsibility for one’s own thoughts and feelings.
What are the three primary types of boundaries described in Structural Family Therapy.
Rigid, diffuse, and clear
What is unbalancing?
Temporarily supporting one subsystem to disrupt rigid family patterns and shift hierarchy.
What is holism?
The belief that individual behavior cannot be understood apart from the larger relational context.
What is the family projection process?
The process through which parental anxiety and unresolved differentiation issues are transmitted to children.
What is de-triangulating?
The process of helping clients dismantle emotional triangles to improve system functioning.
What is a coalition?
A pattern in which two family members align rigidly against a third member.
What is boundary making?
An intervention aimed at strengthening appropriate generational boundaries and parental authority.
What is circular thinking?
A systemic shift that reframes symptoms as meaningful within relational patterns rather than as individual pathology.
What is the multigenerational transmission process?
Bowen’s concept describing how low levels of differentiation are passed across generations through partner selection and parenting.
What is emotional cutoff?
A coping strategy often mistaken for maturity but actually reflecting low differentiation and unresolved fusion.
What is second-order change?
Structural change that alters the organization of the family system rather than just surface behaviors.
What is structural rigidity?
Minuchin’s belief that families become dysfunctional when rigid transactional patterns prevent adaptation to stress.