Defining Couple and Family Therapy

1. Defining Couple and Family Therapy • Two essential ways to define family therapy • A therapeutic endeavor that focuses on altering the interactions and improving the functioning among family members • Having more than one family member involved in the treatment sessions

2. Comparison of Couple and Family Therapy • Issues unique to couple therapy • Sexual problems • Possibility of someone leaving relationship • Issues common to couple and family therapy • Communication • Attachment • Problem-solving

3. Early Family therapy • Became prominent in the 1950s • Core importance of the family system and a rejection of usefulness of individual therapy • General systems therapy • Cybernetics • The science of communication and control in man and machine • Paradoxical interventions • Therapist suggests the opposite of what was sought to produce psychological reactance and a reverse effect

4. Systems Theory Applied to Personality and Psychopathology • People act as they do because they are parts of a system, not because of individual development, intrapsychic conflict, or learned behavior • Humans are part of an open system • There is an ongoing exchange with those lying outside the system • Three cornerstones • Circular causality • Cybernetics • Communication process

5. Primary Dimensions of Structural Family Therapy • Boundaries • The rules defining who participates and how they participate in various operations • Range of boundaries from disengagement to enmeshment • Alliances • Represent the joining or opposition of one member of a system to another in carrying out various operations • Triangulation • Power • Depicts the relative influence of each family member on the outcome of various family activities

6. Strategic Approaches • Associated with team approaches and the detached stance on the part of the therapist • Types of strategic approaches • Mental research institute model • Haley’s problem-solving therapy • Milan systemic therapy • Solution-focused therapy

7. Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches • Central mechanisms • Classical and operant conditioning • Social exchange mechanisms • Homework assignments • Interventions • Monitoring • Skills training • Behavior exchange • Shaping • Large amount of empirical support

8. Psychoeducational Approaches • First developed in the context of schizophrenia • Survival skills • Crisis management

9. Intergenerational Approaches • Bowen therapy • Differentiation of self • Family projection process • Genograms • Other approaches • Invisible loyalties • Ledgers • Multidirected partiality

10. Psychodynamic Approaches • Active, dynamic formulations in couple and family therapy • Importance of unconscious mental processes and early experiences • Understanding transference and countertransference

11. Additional Psychotherapeutic Approaches • Experiential Approaches • Accentuating the healing power of emotional moments in therapy for restoring a sense of liveliness and connection • Narrative Approaches • Social constructivism • Problem-oriented descriptions are replaced by stories of accomplishment • Integrative Approaches • Merges the raw material of the various approaches at three distinct levels: theory, strategy, and intervention

12. Generic Integrative Family Therapy • Multilevel biopsychosocial understanding of human functioning • Intervention strategies • Psychoeducation • Behavioral Methods • Cognitive and narrative strategies • Focus on emotion