Core Concepts in Marriage and Family Therapy
Dr. Sparrow -- Marriage and Family Counseling -- EPSY 6393
Instructions:
It is important for you to know the meaning of each of these concepts before you leave
the course. You will be tested on most of them.
However, for the purposes of our online Core Concepts work you and your team
members will only have to demonstrate the concepts in bold font, of which there are 28.
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Cyberneticists (Palo Alto Group)
circular causality, reciprocity, cybernetics. feedback loops
punctuated communication
homeostasis and morphogenesis
family rules
report vs. command communications
focus on dyadic communication that sustains the problem
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Chapter 5: Family Systems Therapy--Bowen
focus on triangles as structure
focus on triangulation as process
complementarity and similarity: pursuer-distancer, etc.
1) assessment of cross generational transmission of family patterns
emotional cut-off
differentiation of self
nuclear family emotional process
2) displacement story
3) I-position
4) process description
5) process question
cross-generational triangle or coalition
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Chapter 6: Strategic Family Therapy
6) reframing (used in many approaches, not just this one)
bringing symptoms under therapeutic control through...
therapeutic double bind (generic description of effect fostered through...
paradoxical interventions, such as
7) predicting symptoms and
8) prescribing symptoms
9) restraining change
symptoms as functional
one downsmanship
symptoms as meaningful
indirect communication
10) using metaphors in reframing
cross-generational triangle
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Chapter 7: Structural Family Therapy
11) joining and assessing the problem from all points of view
boundaries
enmeshment
disengagement
power and hierarchies
spontaneous sequences of behaviors
12) enactment
boundary setting in the session: opening boundaries between disengaged parties, closing
boundaries by blocking interaction between members who have been enmeshed
family structure
13) refusing to do the family's work for them
14) intensification
15) unbalancing
building on, or
16) shaping competencies
cross-generational triangle
17) homework to compensate for boundary problems (either to open boundaries
between disengaged family members, or to strengthen boundaries between
enmeshed members)
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Chapter 8: Experential Family Therapy
focus on emotional suppression, surplus repression
18) encouraging members to engage in individual self expression
focus on freedom and immediacy of experience
blaming. placating, irrelevancy, super reasonable
self actualization
existential encounter, powerful interventions to get family members to reveal what's on
their minds
19) therapist transparency and activism
Chapter 9: Psychodynamic (Psychoanalytic) Therapy
interpretation
20) linking to past trauma or unfinished business
analytic neutrality
21) asking what is similar and what is different
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Chapter 10: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
assessing reinforcement contingencies
22) teaching parents to influence their children’s or spouse’s behaviors,
primarily through realizing when they are reinforcing symptoms, and by using
positive reinforcement
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Chapter 12: Solution-Focused Brief Therapy
Influences: social constructionism, Ericksonian hypnotherapy
23) search for exceptional moments
24) formula first session task
25) miracle question
26) using compliments
building on, or shaping competencies (part of other systems, too)
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Chapter 13: Narrative Therapy
social constructionism, narrative theory
27) externalization
28) deconstructing beliefs and narratives
deconstruction of symptoms
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