Family Therapy: Improving Communication & Resolving Conflict - Essay Sample

Introduction

Family therapy is psychological counseling that mainly deals with family issues. The main project of this type of treatment is to resolve family conflicts, improve communication, or solve other psychological family related abnormalities. Therefore, family system therapy is a psychotherapeutic practice that draws on system thinking of a family as a unified emotional unit. That is, family therapy evaluates the individual parts of a family as part of a system as a whole (Israelstam, 1998). There are four major paradigms of family system therapy, namely: structural, Milan, Strategic, and affective-experiential models (Israelstam, 1998). However, this paper will only focus on two- Strategic and Structural family therapy. The paper aims to examine these two paradigms in-depth compare and contrast there functionality and provide the strengths and weaknesses of each. The paper will also include a family case and map and recommend the most appropriate type of family therapy and the best way to address the family issue.

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Strategic Family Therapy

This model of family therapy roots its origin in the early 1950s from Palo Alto research that was led by a renowned psychiatrist Gregory Bateson (Piercy, Sprenkle, & Wetchler, 1996). The study majored on schizophrenic patients and their families. From his observations, Bateson conceptualized schizophrenia to rise out of communication discrepancies in the various levels of the family hierarchy. This model is built on the assumption that the cause of the problem is not based on identification the behavior instead it is how the family as a system responds to the problem within the communication patterns (Shhehan & Fiedlander, 2015). For specification purposes and perhaps patient age group, a more refined model under the strategic family therapy was founded. The Brief Strategic Family Therapy (BSFT) is a strategic family system therapy approach that is based on the notion that a family is the most influential force that has a significant influence on children and adolescent development (Szapocznik, Muir, Duff, Schwartz, & Brown, 2015). Thus, in strategic family therapy, the psychiatric focus on the family's communication patterns and interactions of each family member in response to the problem, and seeks to intervene to improve the situation by establishing well thought and strategically implement methods (Israelstam, 1998).

The Core Concept of Strategic Family Therapy

The core concept of this model is hierarchical, systemic, and is more precisely based on examining and understanding the root problem, its response, and communication patterns. Therapists who use this model believe that "the problem is maintained by faulty family hierarchies (Piercy, Sprenkle, & Wetchler, 1996). Thus, by helping the family change its way of interaction towards the problem will result in the structure altering as well. This means that the cause of the family problem usually arises from the family's subsequent attempts to solve the problem exacerbate and perhaps maintains the problem (Piercy, Sprenkle, & Wetchler, 1996).

Strengths and Weaknesses

This approach is very effective for families of youths and teenagers who have a behavior problem such as drug abuse, delinquency, unsafe sexual activities, and antisocial peer affiliation. The approach is relatively short compared to the other interventions and not only reduces the youth problems, but it also establishes a better functioning family (Szapocznik, Muir, Duff, Schwartz, & Brown, 2015). However, this approach often requires a very experienced therapist since he/she is fully responsible for defining and designing the specific strategies that will be used create change in the family system (Israelstam, 1998). The greatest weakness of this therapeutic approach is that the strategic directives can easily disrupt cycles and sequences and thus replacing the functional courses (Wheeler, 2014).

Structural Family Therapy

Salvador Minuchin at the Wiltwyck School in New York first introduced structural family therapy (Gladding, 2007). This model focuses on family relationships, their structures, and behavior patterns, as they are exhibited by the subsystems during a therapy session to an aim to evaluate and establish the structure of the family. Structural family therapy assumes that the family problem emerges when the family boundaries are not defined or are not clear when the family is faced with hierarchical challenges (Israelstam, 1998). Structural family therapists thus develop definite and fairly-fixed ideas of how a 'healthy' family structural map 'ought' look like and function; that is, the family to have flexible boundaries between the subsystem (Israelstam, 1998).

Strengths and Weaknesses

This model's greatest strength is that it is very effective in families with poverty-related stress (McNeil, Herschberger, & Nedela, 2013). An emphasis on the family structure characterizes this family therapeutic approach. As a result, the significant tents of this therapy approach as boundaries, subsystems, hierarchies, coalitions, alliances, and triangles (McNeil, Herschberger, & Nedela, 2013).

Structural Family Mapping

The family structure map above shows that there is a conflict between the parents and the child (35-years males with Schizophrenia and sexually preoccupied). The dispute has arisen from the parents fear that their child is not independent enough to make his own decisions, which has affected their communication. By combining both strategic and structural family therapy, the parents are encouraged to give him the space to become independent.

References

Gladding, S. (2007). Family therapy: History, theory, and practice. Upper Saddle River: Merrill.

Israelstam, K. (1998). Contrasting four major family therapy paradigms: implications for family therapy training. Journal of Family Therapy, 179-196. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j..1988.00311.x

McNeil, S. N., Herschberger, J. K., & Nedela, M. N. (2013). Low-Income Families With Potential. The American Journal of Family Therapy Adolescent Gang Involvement: A Structural Community Family Therapy Integration Model, 41(2), 110-120. doi:10.1080/01926187.2011.649110

Piercy, F. P., Sprenkle, D. H., & Wetchler, J. L. (1996). Family Therapy Sourcebook. New York: Guilford Press.

Shhehan, A. H., & Fiedlander, M. L. (2015). Therapeutic alliance and retention in brief strategic family therapy: A mixed-methods study. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 415 - 427. doi:10.1111/jmft.12113

Szapocznik, J., Muir, J. A., Duff, J. H., Schwartz, S. J., & Brown, C. H. (2015). Brief Strategic Family Therapy: Implementing evidence-based models. Psychotherapy Research, 25(1), 121-133. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2013.856044

Wheeler, K. (2014). Psychotherapy for the advanced practice psychiatric nurse: A how-to guide for evidence-based practice (2nd ed.). New York: Springer Publishing Company.