Structural Family Therapy Flashcards
Therapist’s Role
Structural Family Therapy
Therapist is active and involved -understand culture - friendly uncle
Alliances
Structural Family Therapy
Subgroups based on gender, generation, developmental tasks.
Coalitions
Structural Family Therapy
Alignments where 2 or more family members join together to form a bond
against another family member.
Power Hierarchy
Structural Family Therapy
Leadership and direction must be provided by the adults, typically
parents. Sometimes when parents are intimidated or insecure, the power is upside down
and it leads to chaos.
Subsystems
Structural Family Therapy
Families organize themselves by generation, relationship, and necessity.
Examples: marital subsystem – spouses; parental subsystem: parents; executive
subsystem: people who run the family; sibling subsystem – kids.
Family Map
Structural Family Therapy
A tool the therapist will use to depict the relationship dynamics in the family
including sub-systems, alliances, coalitions and boundaries. This tool is used to conceptualize the case outside of the actual therapy. It is not used or shared with the family.
Enmeshed Boundaries
Family members are overly dependent and too closely involved and reactive to other family members. Can lead to incest.
Disengaged Boundaries
Structural Family Therapy
Where family members are isolated from each other. Can lead to AOD use and is a result of rigid boundaries.
Mimesis
Structural Family Therapy
The therapist tracks the family’s style of communication and uses it.
Tracking:
Structural Family Therapy
The therapist pays close attention to family members and how they relate to one another during an enactment or spontaneous behavioral sequence, noticing boundaries, coalitions, roles, rules, etc.
Joining
Structural Family Therapy
Therapist’s first task; involves blending in with the family, adapting the family’s affect, style, and language.
Unbalancing
Structural Family Therapy
Supporting someone who is in a one-down position, thus changing
hierarchical position.
Reframe
Structural Family Therapy
Putting the presenting problem in a perspective that is both different from what
the family brings and more workable.
Enactment
Structural Family Therapy
The actualization of transactional patterns under the control of the therapist.
It allows the therapist to observe how family members mutually regulate their behaviors,
and to determine the place of the problem behavior within the sequence of transactions.
