Family Therapy - Chapter 1

The pursuer-distancer dynamic

Is a common relationship pattern where one partner seeks closeness while the other seeks independence. It can cause tension and lead to feelings of misunderstanding and being overwhelmed.

Schizophrenia

Is a chronic mental illness that affects how people think, feel, and behave. It can cause people to have difficulty distinguishing reality from their own thoughts and ideas. 

Undifferentiated family ego mass

Is a term used to describe families with low levels of differentiation. In these families, family members are "emotionally stuck together" and individuality is viewed as threatening to the family's stability.

Who was the first to practice family therapy.

In the early 1950s, family therapy was begun independently in four different places: by John Bell at Clark University, Murray Bowen at NIMH, Nathan Ackerman in New York, and Don Jackson and Jay Haley in Palo Alto.

Name other figures important to the founding of family therapy

Others who made significant contributions to the founding of family therapy were Virginia Satir, Carl Whitaker, Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, and Salvador Minuchin.

No matter how many and varied the explanations of these emergent properties are, they all fall into two categories: structure and process. Break down structure and process?

The structure of families includes triangles, subsystems, and boundaries. Among the processes that describe family interaction— emotional reactivity, dysfunctional communication, and so on —the central concept is circularity.