Group Psychotherapy: The Aspects of Practicing Family Therapy - Essay Example

 Family Therapy 2005 The challenge for practicing family therapists is to recreate a system that fits the best (Ackley, 1997). As for a hypothetical family of 5, it needs to identify family strengths and then to build practice around them. Self-reflection here also helps. A family therapist must consider such point as ‘family rules’ which are established by the head\heads of the family (it depends on the type of inner family structure). Social relationships are voluntary, but the familial ones are not (Benjamin, 1977). When ‘power’ or rules are understood to refer to a form of involuntary relationship, this power will lead to abuses. So, dictatorships in family relations will develop duplicity, passive rebellion (passive aggressive behavior), and other forms of behavior that in an interpersonal relationship would be called psychopathological (Hill, 1949), and the therapist is to deal with it. The family is meant to be a place of safety and unconditional acceptance. Rules within a family can help to create this environment by enforcing rules of mutual respect and validation. In healthy family environment these rules fit everyone’s values and are consciously chosen. But in case of a family crisis, if these rules do not reflect family values, it leads to pseudomutuality or real family conflicts. If a family, for instance, have a child, they will face the problem of constructing a new kind of relations with an adolescent child, when genetic factors strongly influence unreasonable for parents aggression, antisocial behavior, and delinquency, emotional distress. (Hill, 1949). If a child in this age isn’t understood and supported by his family, the family therapists tasks is to teach his parents the right behavior in these situations. In adolescence children’s feeling need to be perceived and understood to avoid interpersonal conflicts appearance. The argument is that adolescents are more emotional, and that leads to conflict and turmoil. The therapist here needs to understand the reasons of it, and then - to stream the therapeutic process in that way. Family crisis demotes the family susceptibility to continued instability, disorganization and dysfunction. Crisis-producing events are those normative and non-normative life events that disrupt the family system and that precipitate changes in, or the necessity for changes in, the family’s patterns of functioning, thus placing the family system at risk for continued decline in functioning leading to dysfunction. (Benjamin, 1977) Family risk factors involve the notions of pseudomutuality, pseudohostility, mystification and scapegoating. Family researchers name such critical family recovery factors as family integration, when parents afford to keep the family together and maintain an optimistic outlook for the child’s health; family support and esteem building, when parents seek for a support from the community and friends; family recreation orientation, control, and organization, when the family practice recreational and sporting activities, and control the family rules and organization; family optimism and mastery to maintain a sense of order and optimism. (Young & Wilrnott, 1973) A great role in family therapy depends on family paradigm, that means that families over time create an internally regulated sense of shared values, beliefs, expectations, and rules that guide and shape the major domains of family functioning: work-family relationships, disciplining and raising children, the marital relationship, and intergenerational responsibilities. (McCubbin, Thompson, 1993). If we view a family of five, there exist two or three age generations, where such problems are the most significant ones. This collective set of rules, values and beliefs plays a vital role as a recovery factor in promoting family harmony and balance in the context of a family crisis. This family paradigm guides family behavior and adaptation in the case of family crisis, and the therapist task is to base on it. Pseudomutuality is viewed in the context of disturbed families which maintained a façade of internal familial harmony together with a denial of problems (Wynne et al., 1958). It is a miscarried solution to the problem of a disjunction between belief in equality and actual inequality. Inner family relations can be mutual or non-mutual. So that, pseudomutuality occurs when the recognition of non-mutuality is forbidden or at least very painful. It consists of ways of denying non-mutuality or, conversely, of affirming mutuality where none exists. ( Young & Wilrnott, 1973) It usually happens in the families with authoritative parental rules, where less freedom is given to children to show their views and make suggestions. Bad family environment, less of understanding and support, directive style of parental behavior usually lead to scapegoating – a hostile social-psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. It can also be a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target here feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, criticism and blame. (Hill, 1949). This process is unconscious, and is likely to be denied by the perpetrator, with the help of therapist, because it leads to aggression, sometimes unreasonable and not-understandable for the members of family. The therapist task here is to identify a problematic zone and help a person to understand himself. Scapegoating can also be seen as the perpetrator’s defense mechanism against unacceptable emotions such as hostility and guilt (Scheidlinger, 1982). From the other point of view, scapegoaters are insecure people driven to raise their own status by lowering the status of their target (Carter, 1996). It often takes place in families where children are viewed by parents as targets to set their aggression for. The family of five, that is an example under consideration, consisting of three generations, faces the problem of death that can make a very pathogenic effect on a child. It happens as the result of the family’s culture-bound inability to integrate death as a natural part of the process of living. The family usually tries to deal with death problem by the avoidance mechanisms of myth and family mystification that is a confusion resulting from failure to understand (Benjamin, 1977). But in most cases it is mostly pathogenic process rather than facing the experience with death itself. Family therapist must identify the root of the family problem existed and then construct the therapy process in the corresponding way to abolish the problem, make family environments cohesive with low conflict and which are less distressed. A therapist as a supporter must work on different family generative representatives to cope with the problem on different levels, to help the family to decide, to overcome the state of crisis and inner misunderstandings, and to teach them to adjust to new realia, to new family existence state and new family rules and paradigm. References 1. Ackley, D. (1997). Breaking free of managed care. New York: Guilford 2. Benjamin, L.S. 1977. "Structural Analysis of a Family in Therapy." Journal of Counseling and Clin Constantine, L. 1986. Family Paradigms. New York: Guilford Press. 3. Carter, C.A. (1996) Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. Norman, USA 4. Hill, R. (1949). Families under stress. New York: Harper & Row 5. McCubbin, H. I., Thompson, E. A., Thompson, A. I., & McCubbin, M. A. (1993). Family schema, paradigms, and paradigm shifts: Components and processes of appraisal in family adaptation to crises. In: A. Turnbull, J. Patterson, S. Bahr, D. Murphy, J. Marquis, & M. Blue-Banning (Eds.), Cognitive coping, families, & disability (pp. 239-255). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. 6. Scheidlinger, S: On Scapegoating [etc]. Int J. Group Psychotherapy. 32, 1982. p131-142 7. Young, M. & Wilrnott, P. (1973) The Symmetrical Family. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Read More