Couples and Families Flashcards
Accepting Influence
Being able to manage you internal conflict before you can manage your external conflict.
Being open to a partner’s ideas.
Allowing each member to tell their story themselves
Having each partner self disclose their feelings
Bids
When you try to reach out to your partner during an arguement.
For example, “I’m sorry for hurting you, how can we work together to move past this?”
Boundaries
Rules for managing physical and psychological distance between family members, for defining the regulation of closeness, distance, hierarchy, and family roles
Enmeshed
Relationships with no limits, no boundaries
Case Conceptualizations
Knowing where to focus your attention while listening.
Viewing the situation in new and different ways.
Clinical Documents
A way for therapists to leave a trace of their work so that they can get paid through third-party payers (Insurance) and avoiding lawsuits (the state lets you practice).
Couple Boundaries
Rules that are highly complex and difficult to track.
Four Horsemen: Criticism
Complaint or Blaming that is attacking your partner’s personality or character.
Four Horsemen: Defensiveness
Counterattacks people use to defend their innocence or to avoid taking responsibility for the problem.
Four Horsemen: Contempt
Feeling superior to your partner. Involves rolling of the eyes, sarcasm, name-calling, beligerence, or mocking
Four Horsemen: Stonewalling
When the listeners withdraw from the conversation, offering no physical or verbal cues that they’re affected by what they hear.
Confidentiality
both a legal and ethical requirement for psychotherapists, that they cannot share what clients tell them.
Documentation
One treatment plan for an entire family.
Keeping records and files for individual or all family members
Dreams/Longing within conflict
Communicating with your significant other of how you long for something rather than criticizing them for what they are doing wrong.
Homeostasis
The tendency to maintain a particular range of behaviors and norms
Treatment Plan
A general set of directions for how to address client concerns
Intergenerational Patterns
Patterns that are passed down from generation to generation
Intervention
action taken to improve a situation.
Used in families with an alcohol addict to benefit the addict as well as family constellation.
Family
A group consisting of parents and children living together in a household.
Normal family consists of two parents and two children.
Family Functions
Processes by which the family operates as a whole, including communication and manipulation of the environment for problem solving.
Family Homeostasis
Rules that are expected from one another in a family and must have orderly and predictable rules.
DSM-IV-TR/DSM V
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
Listings of codes and Diagnoses
Diagnosis
The act of identifying a disease, illness, or a problem by examining someone or something
Complementary Patterns
One person’s behavior complements the other’s.
Hidden Agenda
A secret or ulterior motive for something
Genogram
A pictorial display of a person’s family relationships and medical history.
Family Myths and Cognitive Patterns
Behaviors are manifested by family members that flow from shared perceptions or myths about one another and the world at large
