Communication & Concepts
Ways that certain behaviors repeat in a family over time.
What are family patterns?
Redundant behavior patterns by which a family abides - can be written, unwritten, stated, or unstated
What are Family Rules?
Individuals create their own reality/meaning or personal construct
What is constructivism?
Relabeling a family's description of behavior to make it more amendable to therapeutic change.
What is reframing?
Family Stability that is achieved by feedback
What is homeostasis?
Paying attention to how members of a group interact rather than merely to what they say.
What is the process and the content?
Also
What is command and report?
The study of feedback mechanisms in self-regulating systems
What is cybernetics?
Interpretations and meaning are shaped by our context
What is Social Construction?
This theory's interventions have sometimes been seen as manipulative.
What is Strategic Family Therapy?
Superficial change in a family system.
What is first-order change?
The second message in communication that often goes unnoticed
What is metacommunication?
Diverting conflict between two people by involving a third
What are Triangles?
Problems are sustained by an ongoing series of actions and reactions rather than a single cause.
What is circular causality?
This theory has the family therapist start the process by attempting to become part of the family, in a way.
What is Structural Family Therapy? (Joining)
A process by which the status quo in a family system is maintained even when there is an external change.
What are Negative Feedback loops?
Receiving two related but contradictory messages
What is Double Bind?
Initial Phone Call, First Interview, Early Phase, Middle Phase, Termination
What are the stages of Family Therapy?
These are defined by boundaries.
What are subsystems?
A paradoxical directive in which the therapist directs clients to continue their symptomatic behavior.
What is prescribing the symptom?
What is second-order change?
The behaviors that individuals take on in a family (whether other-prescribed, self-prescribed, or fall into)
What are Family Roles?
The person all on whom all problems are blamed
What is a scapegoat, or Identified Patient?
Reciprocity and evenly distributed roles (though not the same) are the defining features of the relationship
What is a complementary relationship?
Feedback that reinforces a new direction the system is taking
What is positive feedback?
Ethnicity, gender, generation, societal expectations, religion, background
What is Context of the family?