Family Systems Perspectives Flashcards
skewed families
- mom=domineering
- father= passive
often leads to male schizophrenia
schismatic families where parents fight
mom = insecure father = pompous or paranoid
often leads to female schizophrenia
major points related to skewed and schismatic families
- no proof of cause, but environmental stressors contribute
- amorphous v. fragmented communications in family system (not cause)
- expressed emotion studies (Brown 1959; Vaugh & Leff, 1970; Hooley 1985)
- hostile, angry, critical, overprotecting communication
- appears to be predictor of relapse in patients – HIGH EE relative has 2-3 fold relapse increase)
- can’t prove what deviant patterns caused or initiated what
Communicatioin studies
Bateson, 1956; Weakland, 1960
- Double bind hypothesis (send mixed and conflicting messages)
- not conclusive
- many families have this - communication deviance (Wynne & Singer 1963)
- disrupts the cognitive development of the child leading to developmental information processing deficits
Who are prominent theorists for systems theory?
- Bowen (1972, 1978)
- Minuchin (1967, 1972)
- Satire (1967)
Basics of systems theory
Bowen, 1972, 1978
Family Therapy
- Based on chaos theories – structure and chaos
- General Theory: Sum of parts of family make a greater whole
- Resistance – equilibrium
- A family system is made of subsystems (e.g., Parental subsystem, parent-child subsystem, sibling subsystem)
Please list important concepts of Bowen’s (1972, 1978) systems theory.
- differentiation of self
- nuclear family emotional system
- marital conflict
- dysfunction in one spouse
- impairment of one or more children - triangles
- family projection process
- multigenerational transmission process
- emotional cutoff
- sibling position
- societal emotional process
- enmeshment
- triangulation
- disengaged family
- differentiation
- fusion
Differentiation of the self
being able to separate one’s own needs from the needs of the family
marital conflict
- As family tension increases and the spouses get more anxious, each spouse externalizes his or her anxiety into the marital relationship.
- Each focuses on what is wrong with the other, each tries to control the other, and each resists the other’s efforts at control
dysfunction in one spouse
- One spouse pressures the other to think and act in certain ways and the other yields to the pressure.
- Both spouses accommodate to preserve harmony, but one does more of it.
- interaction is comfortable for both people up to a point, but if family tension rises further, the subordinate spouse may yield so much self-control that his or her anxiety increases significantly.
- anxiety fuels, if other necessary factors are present, the development of a psychiatric, medical, or social dysfunction.
impairment of one or more children
- The spouses focus their anxieties on one or more of their children. They worry excessively and usually have an idealized or negative view of the child.
- The more the parents focus on the child the more the child focuses on them. He is more reactive than his siblings to the attitudes, needs, and expectations of the parents.
- The process undercuts the child’s differentiation from the family and makes him vulnerable to act out or internalize family tensions. The child’s anxiety can impair his school performance, social relationships, and even his health.
emotional distance
People distance from each other to reduce the intensity of the relationship, but risk becoming too isolated
Triangles
In order to help relieve stress/anxiety, a dyad will introduce a third member. There will be two people on the “inside” and one on the “outside.” Being on the outside can promote intense feelings of rejection, leading the person on the outside to try and ally with one of the individuals on the inside. Roles shift in triangles.
Family Projection Process
(1) the parent focuses on a child out of fear that something is wrong with the child;
(2) the parent interprets the child’s behavior as confirming the fear; and
(3) the parent treats the child as if something is really wrong with the child.
multigenerational transmission process
- describes how small differences in the levels of differentiation between parents and their offspring lead over many generations to marked differences in differentiation among the members of a multigenerational family.
- The information creating these differences is transmitted across generations through relationships.
- The transmission occurs on several interconnected levels ranging from the conscious teaching and learning of information to the automatic and unconscious programming of emotional reactions and behaviors. Relationally and genetically transmitted information interact to shape an individual’s “self.”
