TOPIC FACILITATION SUMMARY
- PERCEPTIONS and ATTITUDES
The personal characteristic of the therapist determine how a particular intervention is delivered. Therapist must be able to utilize skills that fit their own personality. The ability to feel and be hopeful, emphatic, assertive, confrontative, and focused are all part of being a therapist.
Perception of Client Competence
Many family therapist use language that describes and labels competencies in clients, clients can become experts about themselves. Family therapists are finding that an exploration of strengths is essential to challenge family dysfunctions. This is representative of a trend toward competence-based treatment in which strengths and successes are systematically investigated and highlighted as a central element in the treatment process.
Therapist Flexibility
Some of the attributes that the family therapy supervisors regarded as important include: non judgmental, respectful of differences, understanding that one reality does not work for everyone, and meet clients where they are.
- BEHAVIORS
Practitioners who emphasized the role of the family considered the goal to be the treatment of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. For this therapist, the goal of therapy was healing, and the treatment of choice was the involvement of family members with the symptomatic person. This paced the therapist in a traditional doctor-patient relationship but with a more active, directive role than traditional psychoanalysis, which encouraged the therapist to remain aloft and detached.
Questions
Someone once said that wisdom is not having the right answer but asking the right question. Family therapist makes systematic use of questions to elicit information that brings about change. These authors coined the term “circular questions” to refer to the line of questioning that they used in family interviews. These questions are of four types: problem definition, sequence of interaction, comparison/ classification, and intervention.
Tracking Interactional Sequences
Structural and strategic models define the therapeutic goals as structural or interactional change within the family system. Both models are chiefly interested in how family members interact with each other. Ericksonian and brief therapists also have a strong emphasis on tracking interactions with clients. In these models, the therapist gathers very specific information about what a client does when depressed or less depressed. Specific interventions are designed to interrupt or change the behavioral patterns that appear to be the family’s response to a presenting problem.
Reframing
Reframing is a reinterpretation of the problem or symptoms. After the concept of reframing was introduced to the family therapy profession, the term was generalized to refer to relabeling or a new understanding of the problem. In learning how to reframe a problem, the family therapist must understand how the reframe will facilitate change. The therapists own limited way of defining a problem may prove an obstacle to reframing.
Directives
Through simple directives aimed at changing some behavioral pattern, the family therapist creates new possibilities by directing new interactions that family does not initiate independently. The structural therapist and collaborative therapist are both active in directing behavior.
FACILITATORS:
May Monteloyola
Lovely Ann Mangaring
Consuelo Partosa
