Broad Systemic
Concepts
Concepts
Parts of a system mutually affect one another.
What is interconnectedness?
He developed the concept of differentiation of self.
Who is Murray Bowen?
Hierarchy, power, and strategic directives.
What is Strategic Family Therapy?
Bowen believed symptoms arise from this emotional process.
What is chronic anxiety?
This intervention uses calm, curiosity-based questions to slow reactivity and help clients observe their part in family patterns.
What is process questioning from Bowen Family Systems Theory?
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
What is holism?
She emphasized congruence and communication stances.
Who is Virgina Satir?
Boundaries, subsystems, and restructuring.
What is Structural Family Therapy?
Satir believed dysfunction emerges when this internal experience is suppressed.
What are emotions?
This intervention uses physical positioning or movement to help clients externalize and visualize relational dynamics.
What is sculpting from Satir Validation Model?
Predictable patterns of interaction that maintain family functioning.
What are family rules?
He viewed the family as a living organism and used absurdity.
Who is Carl Whitaker?
Attempted solutions and interrupting problem cycles.
What is MRI Brief Therapy?
MRI conceptualizes dysfunction as resulting from this mismatch.
What is the fit between the problem and the attempted solution?
This intervention encourages clients to express previously hidden or muted emotional experiences to increase authenticity in the session.
What is emotional confrontation from Symbolic-Experiential Therapy?
Different pathways can reach the same outcome in a system.
What is equifinality?
He believed that symptoms reflect dysfunctional transactional patterns that require realignment of boundaries and roles.
Who is Salvador Minuchin?
Emotional process, anxiety, and differentiation.
What is Bowen Family Systems Theory?
Strategic therapy views symptoms as serving this function in the family.
What is maintaining power or control?
This intervention requires the therapist to temporarily align with one member or subsystem to shift the family's relational balance.
What is unbalancing from Structural Family Therapy?
What is multifinality?
He described human problems as products of recursive feedback loops in which families inadvertently amplify the issues they are attempting to solve.
Who is Paul Watzlawick?
Experiential encounter, spontaneity, and symbolic meaning.
What is Symbolic-Experiential Therapy?
Structural therapy views dysfunction as resulting from misaligned, diffuse, or rigid versions of this systemic concept.
What are boundaries and subsystems?
This intervention reconceptualizes a problem behavior by assigning it a new systemic meaning that alters how the family responds to it.
What is reframing, from Strategic/MRI/Structural/Satir/S-E?