Family Counseling

FAMILY
COUNSELING
By: Group 3
Learning objectives:
◦ To understand the vital concept of Family Counseling

◦ To understand the role of Family Counselors
◦ What is the focus of Family Counselling ?
◦ What are the theories of Family Counseling ?
What is Family?
◦ A family is far more than a group of individuals sharing
a physical and psychological space. Families occur in a
diversity of forms ,cultures and complexities in today’s
rapidly changing society.
Family is considered a natural, sustain
social system with these properties:
◦ An evolved set of rules
◦ Many assigned and ascribed roles of its members
◦ An organized power structure
◦ Intricate overt and covert forms of communication
◦ Numerous ways of negotiating and problem solving that permit various tasks
to perform effectively
◦ Each family system is itself embedded in a specific community
History and Pioneers
◦ 1958- Ackerman- Psychoanalysis to the treatment of families and made family
therapy respected in the profession of psychiatry
◦ 1950’s: Nathan Ackerman, Theodore Lidz, Lyman Wynne, Muray Bowen, Carl
whitaker all broke away from psychodynamics – Saw that dysfunctional
behaviour is rooted in the individual’s past and present family life.
◦ Palo Alto California: Gregory Bateson,Jay Haley,Don Jackson, John Weakland
and Milton Erickson developed strategic family therapy.
The structure of a family requires
system
•To become a cohesive whole ,a family typically develops rules that outline and allocate the
roles and function of its members.
• Those who live together for any length of time develop repeatable,preferred
patterns for negotiating and arranging their lives.
•Even in a family crisis situation or where there is severe conflict between members, families
are typically resistant to change and often engaged in corrective manuevers to re-establish
familiar interactive patterns.
• All families should work at promoting positive relationships and prepare to cope with
development or maturational changes (such as children leaving home) as well as an unplanned
and an unexpected crisis (Job dislocation or loss, divorce ,death of a key member ,a sudden
serious illness).
Family interactive patterns
Family typically display stable, collaborative, purposeful and recurring patterns of interactive sequences
Such patterned interaction are jointly engaged in , highly predictable transactional patterns generated by
all family members on cue, as though each participant feel compelled to play a well-rehearsed part.
• The balancing of responsibilities by family members requires long period of negotiating,
compromising , rearranging and competing.
Examples: Who passes the sugar ? Who checks the GPS for directions, chooses the movie, changes the
channel? Who responds to whom , when and in what manner?
Shared family rituals-holiday celebrations, christening, confirmation , graduation, weeding , funeral ,
wakes-are part of ongoing family interaction patterns that helps ensure family identity and continuity.
Family narrative and assumptions
◦ Our individual judgement about what constitutes reality is a function of the beliefs and stories that the
family (as well as the culture) imparts about their experiences.
•As a result, the meanings and understanding we attribute to events and situations
we encounter are embedded in our family’s social , cultural and historical
experiences.
° The narrative or stories a family recounts help explain or justify their structure and interactive patterns.
•The core of family membership is based on acceptance of and belief in a set of shared constructs
about the family itself and its relationships to its social environment.
°Therefore, Language and Dialogue play crucial roles in how human beings come to know the world and
how they interpret or make sense of their subsequent experiences.
Furthermore, members of families typically construct a rational for why undesired behaviour continues and
how they have no alternative but to live in spite of it.
Family life cycle Stages
◦ Unattached adults/ Single young adult leaves home.
◦ Newly married/ Formation of a family through marriage.
◦ Childbearing / Accepting new members in system.
◦ Preschool age child/ Families with young children.
◦ Teenage childs/ Families with adolescents .
◦ Launching centre. Children move out.
◦ Middle age adults.
Diagnosis of Family Dysfunction
◦ Good family functioning is based on diversity.
◦ Poor family functioning is a result of rigidity and narrowness.
◦ The goal of therapy is to offer more complexity rather than provide
explanation as to the family’s dysfunction.
◦ Pathology is looked at in the pattern of interaction among people.
◦ Counselors look for circular causality and not linear causality.
◦ Feeling are not as relevant as actions .
◦ Focus of therapy is not on insight but behavioural change
Stages of Family Counseling
i. Initial information gathering and assessment
ii. Defining the problems
iii. Developing a working contract between counsellor and client
iv. Further data gathering and assessment for the purpose of formulating
alternative
v. Plans for intervention
vi. Choosing a plan for intervention
vii. Intervening for problem alleviation
viii. Stabilizing the results of the change effort
Stages of family counseling
• Pre-session planning
• Joining stage
• The problem statement stage
• The interaction stage
Thank you!!

Family Counseling

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FAMILY

◦ To understand the vital concept of Family Counseling

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