Strategic Family Therapy Level 3 - Vocabulary & Theory Recognition

Vocabulary flashcards generated from Level 3 Strategic Family Therapy exam preparation notes, covering key terms, signature techniques, and model distinctions.

Haley/Madanes Strategic Therapy

A family therapy model focusing on how hierarchy, power, attempted solutions, and symptom function organize problems, utilizing directives, ordeals, pretend techniques, and addressing incongruous hierarchy.

MRI Brief Therapy

A model focused on identifying attempted solutions maintaining a problem and interrupting them through 180-degree changes, restraining change, and second-order change.

Milan Systemic Therapy

An approach focused on circular patterns and family belief systems, utilizing circular questions, neutrality, hypothesizing, positive connotation, and rituals.

Structural Family Therapy

A therapy model examining family organization, boundaries, hierarchy, and subsystems, using tools like enactment, boundary making, unbalancing, and joining.

Bowen Family Systems Therapy

A model focusing on chronic anxiety, differentiation of self, triangles, and multigenerational patterns, using genograms, process questions, the I-position, and detriangulation.

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

A goal-directed approach centered on the preferred future, strengths, and exceptions, utilizing miracle, scaling, exception, and coping questions.

Narrative Therapy

An approach that locates problems within problem-saturated stories rather than people, using externalizing, unique outcomes, dominant discourse analysis, and re-authoring.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)

A model focusing on the attachment cycle and primary vulnerable emotion, helping clients access fear or longing and create new bonding interactions.

Experiential / Satir Therapy

A therapy model emphasizing congruence, self-worth, and blocked emotion, utilizing tools such as sculpting, parts work, and communication stances.

Whitaker Experiential Therapy

An approach promoting growth through authentic emotional encounters, characterized by the therapist's symbolic and provocative use of self.

Behavioral / CBT Family Therapy

A model aiming to change learned behavior, reinforcement, skills, or cognition using contingency management, practice, reinforcement plans, exposure, and thought records.

Contextual Family Therapy

A model focusing on relational ethics, loyalty, legacy, entitlement, and multidirected partiality across generations.

Feminist Family Therapy

An approach that explicitly analyzes gender, power, social location, oppression, and sociopolitical context, while maintaining therapist transparency.

Gottman Method

An approach using research-based couple assessment and skill-building focused on the friendship system, conflict management, and eliminating the Four Horsemen.

Ordeal

A Haley/Strategic technique where the therapist requires a client to perform a difficult or unpleasant task whenever the symptom occurs to alter the problem sequence.

Pretend Technique

A Madanes/Strategic intervention where family members are asked to deliberately act out a symptom, helplessness, or rescuing role.

Symptom Prescription

A Strategic paradoxical technique where the therapist instructs the client to engage in or schedule a non-dangerous symptom to make it deliberate and time-limited.

First-Order versus Second-Order Change

First-order change adjusts behavior within existing system rules; second-order change alters the rules or patterns organizing the system.

Circular Questioning

A Milan systemic technique that explores relationships among relationships by asking one family member about perceptions or interactions between other members.

Strategic Recognition Hierarchy

A 5-step clinical evaluation sequence: 1. Safety, 2. Signature clue, 3. Therapist action, 4. Mechanism of change, 5. Elimination.

Strategic Memory Phrase

'Strategic changes what happens next by changing the problem-maintaining response.'