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Key Features of Structural Family Therapy - Coggle Diagram
Key Features of Structural Family Therapy
Treatment Techniques
Adding Cognitive constructions: advice, information, pragmatic fictions, and paradox
Joining through tracking, mimesi, confirmation of a family member, or accommodation.
Disequilibrium Techniques: reframing, punctuation, unbalancing, enactment, working with spontaneous interaction, boundary making, intensity, restructuring, shaping competence, diagnosing, and adding cognitive constructions
Role of the Therapist
The role changes over the course of therapy
To accomplish change, the therapist uses praise, challenges, direct orders, and judgments
Require high energy and precise timing
Acts dramatically: "Admit it, through your actions and passivity you are playing a major role in how this family operates. You are being selfish and the family is suffering as a result" (p. 302).
An observer and an expert, like a theater director
The therapist works to change the structure of the family at crucial times, without becoming a part of it, so that the family collectively can unite in a healthy and productive way.
Gladding, S. (2018). Family Therapy: History, Theory, and Practice (7th ed.). Pearson. Chapter 13
Theory Concepts
A coalition is an alliance between specific family members against a third member.
The family is seen as the client, and patterns are seen in the transactions.
Families that have an open appropriate structure recover and function better than those that do not.
Spousal subsystems work best when the are complimentary. Parental subsystem is the executive system of the family. The sibling subsystem consists of those of the same generation. A cross-generational alliance contains two different generations.
Every family has a family structure that is only visible when the family is interacting with each other.
Clear boundaries, rigid boundaries, diffuse boundaries.
Triangulation, Parentified children, Alignments, Roles, Rules, and Power