Family Therapy
Stages of family life, from separation from parents to marriage, having children, growing older, retirement, and finally death.
What is Family Life Cycle?
A schematic diagram of a family system.
What is a genogram?
Exploring meaning by taking apart and examining taken-for-granted categories and assumptions, making possible newer and sounder constructions of meaning.
What is deconstruction?
Restructuring techniques of structural family therapy
What is second-order change?
A primary goal of this kind of therapy is to interrupt dysfunctional systems.
What is communication family therapy?
A blurring of psychological boundaries between self and others, and a contamination of emotional and intellectual functioning.
What is emotional fusion?
The ability to distinguish between thoughts and feelings and to choose between being guided by one's intellect or one's emotions; on an interpersonal level, the ability to experience both intimacy and independence.
What is Differentiation of Self?
Psychological isolation that results from overly rigid boundaries
What is disengagement?
Includes all of the following: patterns of communication, how people communicate, & the overall organization of the family.
What is family structure?
A therapist begins each session by greeting each individual by name and asking for each person's point of view.
What is Joining?
Relationships based on difference that fit together.
The smallest STABLE unit of human relationships.
What is a Triangle?
Superficial change in a system which stays invariant.
What is first-order change?
Paying attention to how members of a group interact rather than merely to what they say.
What is Process/Content distinction?
Elements of a system tend to adjust to coordinate their functioning; people may have to work at it. For example when two people marry they must negotiate the nature of the boundaries between them and their families of origin.
What is accommodation?
Ideal number of family members at the initial family interview.
What is the ENTIRE family?
Flight from unresolved, reactive emotional attachment.
What is Emotional cutoff?
Belief that attitudes are shaped by culturally shared assumptions.
What is social constructionism?
A strategic paradoxical directive in which a therapist directs clients to continue their symptomatic behavior as a way of bringing it under therapeutic control.
What is prescribing the symptom?
The school of family therapy that believes problems are perpetuated by "problem-talk" & the most important part of assessment is goal setting.
What is solution-focused therapy?
The idea that the presenting problem resides within one particular family member instead of that family members’ interactions play a role in the problem.
What is linear perspective?
Relabeling a family's description of behavior to make it more amendable to therapeutic change.
What is reframing?
Basic change in the structure or rules of a system
What is second-order change?
The school of family therapy has the primary goal of altering the structure of the family.
What is Structural Family Therapy?
Narrative Family Therapists to separate clients from their symptoms, viewing problems as external oppressors.
What is personify the problem and/or externalizing the problem?