F/P of Family Systems (Final Exam)

Nichols Ch. 1

What is Family/Systemic Therapy?

• dominant forces in our lives are external

  • micro (one-on-one)

  • macro (institutions)

• people are embedded in a network of relationships

• individual problems make more sense with context

• family: primary group whose members assume certain obligations

History/Timeline

1920s/30s

• concern for the family wellbeing

  • prompts interest in personality (tests)

• traced to developments in child guidance movement, marriage counseling, family life education, and social psychiatry present in post WW1

• family as adversary

1950s

• clinicians forced to look deeper into the family

  • patient gets better, other family member gets worse

  • patients get better in the hospital, but revert to behaviors when they return home

• Change in one person changes the system

1960s

• Family/Systems therapy gains legitimacy

  • Communications Model

1970s

• systems therapy begins to flourish

  • structural model

• demonstrated how the field could help

• training schools developed

1980s

• driven by strategic models

  • Mental Research Institute (MRI Group)

    • first director - Don Jackson (1959)

  • Haley & Madanes

  • Milan Group

• Milton Erickson idolized

Modernist Movement Models

• Bowen

• Experimental

• Psychoanalytic

• Behavioral

1990s & Beyond

• critiques of Family/Systems Therapy by post-modernists & feminist family therapists

  • fail to consider larger social context

  • support white, male-controlled (Head of Household) culture

  • lack of sensitivity around gender related issues

  • each member shares equal responsibility for a problem

• Post-modern Models:

  • Solution-Oriented

  • Solution-Focused

  • Narrative

Influences on Systems Theory

Group Dynamics

• “group is greater than the sum of its parts” - Kurt Lewin

• focus on the process (how people interact) instead of content (what is being said)

• role theory

  • social roles carry expectations that help govern/regulate social situations

  • roles tend to be reciprocal and complementary

• Group vs. Family Therapy

  • difference between being vulnerable with strangers and with family (family have a long history/future)

  • family therapy can be a stressful environment

  • structure of family

  • sense of protection lost with family

Child Guidance Movement

• clinics open pre-WW2, but multiplied after

• determined that problems were due to tension in the family

• flaw in tendency to blame the mother

• Levy, Fromm-Reichmann, Bowlby, Acherman

Social Work

• massive impact on family therapy

• greatest contribution

  • P.I.E. (Person in Environment)

• early family therapists were social workers

  • Lynn Hoffman, Virginia Satir, Insoo Kim Berg, Steve de Shazer

Palo Alto Team

• Bateson, Haley, Jackson, Weakland

• “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia” (1956)

• proposed that symptomatic family member must remain symptomatic in order to preserve family homeostasis (status quo)

Communications Model

• the study of relationships in terms of the verbal and nonverbal exchanges

• double bind

  • receiving two contradictory messages on different levels but finding it difficult to detect the inconsistency

  • difficult situation in which you are faced with two choices, both of which will cause suffering

    1. two or more people in an important relationship

    2. repeated experience

    3. primary negative injunction (Don’t do X or I will punish you”

    4. secondary injunction at an abstract level conflicting with the first

    5. tertiary negative injunction that demands a response and prevents escape

    6. not all ingredients (above 5 points) have to be present. victim can be conditioned into seeing the world in double binds which can lead to panic or rage

Nichols Ch. 3

Family Therapy through a Relational Lense

• individual no longer the primary target for intervention

• help family understand system that promotes problem (instead of solving said problem)

• context and relationships promote personality (instead of personality dictating relationship)

Cybernetics

• Norbert Weiner (WW2 mathmatician)

  • used cybernetics in regards to aircraft artillery

• Gregory Bateson

  • Palo Alto Group

  • related Weiner’s idea of cybernetics to the family

• met at the Macy Conference in 1946

• study of feedback mechanisms in self-regulating systems

  • maintain function/stability

• feedback - process by which a system gets information to maintain a steay course

  • can come from within system

  • can be relative external environment

  • positive or negative feedback loops

  • feed into system to promote homeostasis

• homeostasis - balanced state of equilibrium

  • rules of what is/isn’t allowed

  • acknowledge that families resist change

  • believed to be overplayed (early years)

• family rules - boundaries of a family’s homeostatic range

Feedback Loops

• Negative Feedback Loops

  • keeps system in check and diminishes deviation, indicates how far off track a system is straying

  • promotes return to homeostasis after deviation

• Positive Feedback Loops

  • information that confirms/reinforces the direction of a system

  • reinforces direction (positive or negative)

1. Determine if behavior leaves homeostatic range (deviation)

2. If NO (and is reinforced within homeostasis) → positive

3. If YES

   1. does person return to homeostasis after deviation? → negative

   2. does person continue to deviate → positive

• Runaway - unchecked postive feedback loop that promotes a spiral out of control

  • compounds a system’s errors

  • step out of the loop to break runaway cycle

    • metacommunicaton - communicating about the way that you communicate

Cybernetics Applied to Families

• acknowledgement that families resist change

• early family therapists overemphazise

• family rules - family’s homeostatic range

Cybernetics of Cybernetics

• observer no longer objective (they are a participant in what they observe)

• emphasis on the mutual connectedness of observer and observed

• shift to recursive analysis

  • Black Box Metaphor

  • disregard the internal structure of the device/brain and focus solely on the study of its inputs and outputs

  • simplicity leads to expediency

  • inputs - communication

  • outputs - behavior

  • limit/avoid why questions/speculation about individual motives

Systems Theory

• understanding the family unit based on the parts and how they interact

• challenges

  • seeing past personalities/behaviors

  • difficult to find themes/patterns in a group → shift to systems theory

  • “if one person changes, the whole system changes”

• originated in the 1940s

• the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (basketball team metaphor)

• closed system (maintained from within)

General Systems Theory

• Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

• every system is a subsystem of a larger system

• living aspect of families - actively makes efforts to flourish

• open system (continuously interacting with environment)

  • Mechanics VS Living Organisms

    • mechanics (closed system)

    • living organism (open system)

    • equifinality: being able to reach a goal in multiple ways

    • morphogenesis: process by which a system changes its structure to adapt to new contexts

Core Concepts of Family Therapy

• families as central source to mental health

• family interactions seem to repeat over time

• balance between connection and individuation → healthy families

• flexibility prevents dysfunction

• triad - minimum unit for complex family interaction

• individual symptoms have meaning within the family system

Four Primary Questions

• How do individuals develop symptoms in the system?

• how do families balance emotional bonding and individual autonomy?

• How does family conflict become unmanageable?

• How are dysfunctional patterns changed?