Gladding Ch. 12 - Experiential Family Therapy Flashcards
Virginia Satir
● developed an interest in families after incorporating family members into sessions with her schizophrenic clients.
● believed that every individual (and family) has potential for positive growth
● healthy families were those who could openly express emotions with one another
● Developed the human validation process model.
Carl Whitaker
● started his career working with schizophrenic clients.
● therapeutic approach are described as “intuitive, spontaneous, and unstructured” .often encouraged clients to highlight the absurd in order to facilitate genuine interactions between family members.
● Approach has been labeled experiential symbolic family therapy, and he believed that experience was the driving factor of change in family therapy
Guiding Principles / Premises
● product of the humanistic-existential psychology movement of1960s-70s. It was heavily influenced by Gestalt and Client-Centered approaches.
● Guiding Premise: people are generally either unaware of their true emotions, or they suppress their emotions. This facilitates emotional deadness in families that leads to miscommunication and disconnection between family members, resulting in behavioral patterns of dysfunction.
● The resolution to emotional deadness is achieved through encouragement of emotional openness and sensitivity. Therapeutic techniques are focused on this outcome.
● Attachment Theory is utilized to understand interpersonal relationships in the family.
● This approach emphasizes therapeutic process, therapeutic relationship, intra/interpersonal growth, spontaneity, and the present.
Treatment Techniques & Interventions: Whitaker
● Reframing Problematic Behaviors: assist families in redefining past dysfunctional patterns as pursuits of growth rather than attacks.
● Modeling Fantasy Alternatives: facilitating roleplay that models the families imagined ideals - this tests out the client families ideas.
● Differentiate Interpersonal/Intrapersonal Stress: Important to distinguish types of stress because they must be addressed differently.
● Practical Information: using concrete information to help individual family members better understand one another - can be personal/experiential or educational info.
● Emphasize the Experience of an Individual: “augmenting despair” of one family member can help others better understand their emotional experience - especially if one member tends to be overlooked. This can help avoid denial or suppression of emotions.
● Promote Confrontation of Emotions: encourage client families to examine their emotions before behaviors.
● Developmentally Appropriate Treatment of Children: strongly encourage family members to play with children and otherwise treat them in an age-appropriate manner.
Treatment Techniques & Interventions: Satir
● Modeling Effective Communication Using “I” Messages - combats ineffective/indirect communication patterns, expresses feelings in a personal and responsible way.
● Sculpting - families modeled in a way that symbolizes their actual relationship, three roles - sculptor, facilitator, and family members.
● Choreography - Symbolically enacts pattern/sequence in relationship to one another.
● Humor - reduces tension and provides insight if done correctly.
● Touch - used as a communicative tool, do not violate boundaries!
● Props - used to represent behaviors or show impact of actions.
● Family Reconstruction - aid in discovering dysfunctional patterns stemming from family of origin, ie., family map, family life fact chronology, and wheel or circle of influence
Role of the Therapist
Experiential family therapists generally:
● Practice authenticity and act as real people.
● Attempt to remain flexible and creative with their technique.
● Assist family members establish individuality and comfortable roles for themselves.
● Facilitate meaningful experiences that promote authenticity between family members.
Those who align with Satir’s approach assume the role of facilitator and resource person.
● This approach emphasizes the promotion of innate strengths of the family unit.
Those who align more closely with Whitaker’s approach assume the role of active participant rather than teacher or facilitator.
● Whitaker argued that the success of this approach relies heavily on self-disclosure and personal intuition - thus a co-therapist is ideal.
Therapy Course, Process, Outcome
● Process differs for each experiential therapist - work towards finding personal fulfilling roles.
● Family members become more aware of needs and feelings and openly sharing these impressions
● Clear communication, both sending and receiving, clear indicator family is ready to end treatment
● Primary goal is growth
○ Accomplished through winning battle for structure and family’s battle for initiative
● Ideal outcome is to gain congruence between inner experiences and outward behaviors
● Whitaker’s Three Phases to increase pressure to produce breakdown and breakthrough - engagement (become personally involved & encourage change), involvement (broaden horizons & try new behaviors, and disentanglement(action is made, and therapist disengages and becomes consultant)
● Satir’s Human Validation Process Model - making contact (raise self worth, create trust/hope, determine goals), chaos (unpredictable/risk taking, share hurts), and integration (address issues, increase client self-understanding, summarizing).
Comparison to Other Approaches
● Hard to conceptualize, but can be contrasted with other approaches.
● Effectiveness depends on the sensitivity, spontaneity, creativity, and timing of the therapist
● Unlike psychodynamic and Bowen family treatment, focus is put on the present instead of the past - could prevent from dealing past issues impacting present
● Promote individual growth and intrapersonal change, instead of family growth and interpersonal change - not systems oriented - Personal development may not be enough
● Emphasizes feelings in the here and now not guidance for now and future
● Overemphasizes emotion with little focus on solutions for future
Multicultural Implications & Limitations
● Overemphasis on intrapersonal growth and underemphasis of systems: does not account for very real experiences of discrimination and hardship faced by many prospective client families.
● Focus on the present is a possible disadvantage for client families with limited time and resources. This also leaves the therapist vulnerable to missing important historical information.
● Tendency to rely on the personal charisma of the therapist is a possible disadvantage for working with people who are already distrustful of the mental health counseling profession.
● Reliance on creative spontaneity could lead to resistance from family systems who are more likely to be rigid in structure.
Experiential Family Therapy
emphasizes affect, that is, emotions. practitioners consider the expression of affect to be a universal medium in which all can share.
Satir - communications theory
focuses on clarifying transactions among family members.
Whitaker - absurdity
absurdity refers to half-truthful statements that are sill if followed out to their natural conclusion.
Satir - Family reconstruction
helps family members discover dysfunctional patterins stemming from FOO. concentrates on revealing to members the sources of their old learning, enabling family to develop more realistic picture of who their parens are as persons, and setting up ways for family members to discover their respective personhoods. uses family map, family life fact chronology, wheel of influence. starts w/ a star or explorer – a central character who maps his or her family of irigin in visually representative ways.
Other experiential techniques
Play Therapy
Filial Therapy (train parents to be therapeutic agents)
Family Drawings
Puppet interviews
Activities aimed at children
Miniature genogram
role playing
individual superhero and family shield activity
