Structural Family Therapy
Structure, boundaries, and subsystems
What is Essential Components of SFT?
Creating invisible barriers that regulate contact between couples, members of families, and the outside social environment
What is Boundary Making?
Build alliances, disarm defenses, hear narratives, empathize
What is Joining & Accommodating?
Encouraging family members to deal directly with each other while the therapist modifies interactions; spontaneous dysfunctional transactions that punctuate therapy versus the family account of what happens
What is Enactment?
Salvador Minuchin
Who is the creator of SFT?
Go beyond content and interpersonal dynamics to the organization that supports the problems in a family
What is SFT Theory?
Should be discovered and uncovered accurately, not imposed
What is Subtext?
A challenge that describes what people are doing and its consequences, such as a "stroke & kick"
What is Challenging Unproductive Assumptions?
Preliminary assessments that are done early, while the refinements and revisions must not be made too late
What is Structural Mapping?
The 1960s, as a part of the growing interest in systemic ways of conceptualizing human distress and relationship dilemmas
When was SFT created?
Encompasses independence, mutual support, and a functional structure for dealing with problems
What is a Healthy Family?
Structural change; the byproduct is problems get solved
What is SFTs Goal?
Asking parties to speak for themselves, blocking interruptions, and otherwise changing the participation of family members
What is Boundary Making?
Altering the direction of interpersonal flow by reinforcing positives
What is Shaping Competence?
The Wiltwych School
Where was SFT developed?
Diffused boundaries, lack of independence, crippled initiative, and closeness
What is Enmeshment or Enmeshed Boundaries?
Complementary patterns of mutual support or compromise
What is Accommodation?
Disrupting destructive coalitions with intensity regulation
What is Highlighting & Modifying Interactions?
The goal of moving a family toward a more differentiated and competent dealing with their dysfunctional reality; reality as mapped, is expanded or modified
What is Therapeutic Framing or Reframing?
What are Disengagement & Enmeshment?
Rigid, isolated, limited affection, limited support, and autonomy
What is Disengagement or Rigid Boundaries?
An invisible set of functional demands that persistently organizes the interaction of the family
What are Family Rules?
Changing a frozen relationship by joining one individual or subsystem, which shifts the hierarchy of people within the holon
What is Unbalancing?
Getting the family to hear and assimilate the message through repetition and time or distance change
What is Intensity?
Coalitions, boundaries, and power hierarchies between subsystems
What are Rules?