Family Psychologist And Family Therapy

Video: Family Psychologist And Family Therapy

Video: Family Psychologist And Family Therapy
Video: What is Family Therapy? 2024, May
Family Psychologist And Family Therapy
Family Psychologist And Family Therapy
Anonim

In the second part of the article, I will focus on the family therapy itself. Let me remind you that a family therapist views the family not as separate and completely independent people, but as an integral system, which has its own laws and characteristics.

Initially, family therapy was used in working with couples and in mother-child relationships. Now the central role is occupied by the relationship between spouses, it is their relationship that has the greatest impact. The problems and conflicts of spouses are the starting point for precisely studying the processes taking place in the family.

Family therapy helps with: unsuccessful choice of a partner, difficulties in choosing a permanent partner and a future family partner, conflicts with a spouse and in the family as a whole, constant repetitions of negative events and mistakes (betrayal, quarrels, serious and protracted conflicts), psychosomatic diseases associated with family relationships, frequent manifestation of pathogenic symptoms. In family therapy, the ideal vector of movement, or you can call the request: "We want / want to understand what is happening, change the situation and make the right decision."

Usually families seek psychological help at the most critical moment. When everything is hot to the limit. At such moments, full therapy is not possible. In this case, the work of a family therapist is aimed at removing an acute situation, only after that therapy is possible. These families need to be approached with great patience and understanding, and the transition to constructive dialogue can take time. Therapy is aimed at reconstructing the past experience of interaction, which was previously acceptable and adequate, and now has ceased to be constructive and adaptive. Deep therapy is not always possible (tight time constraints, financial constraints, unwillingness to continue therapy, etc.). Then short-term therapy is carried out. Its goal is not to reconstruct past experience, but to remove the symptom, or to partially weaken it. As I already wrote, a symptom can be: betrayal, quarrels, frequent conflicts, various diseases of family members, etc. It is not worth hindering the decision to undergo only short-term therapy, it will be much more productive to support this decision and focus on common goals - helping the family restore its status quo.

There are situations when family therapy will be either useless or even harmful: when one of the spouses is extremely negative about the therapy and openly expresses this. In this case, he will not only slow down the process, but will also prevent him from moving in a constructive direction, rather we can talk about the harm for both spouses of such therapy. In this case, it is worth switching to individual therapy. Psychoses of one of the spouses. They do not allow to adequately perceive reality, and, therefore, there will be no therapeutic contact. It is possible to return to the question of undergoing therapy at the time of the remission stage. Chemical dependence in the acute stage (drug addiction, alcoholism). Everything is approximately the same as in psychosis, it is impossible to conduct therapy when a person has a state of altered consciousness and contact with reality is absent or distorted. Care should be taken when domestic violence occurs.

The global task of family therapy is to rid family members of internal psychological conflicts and to remove the restrictions they impose. Some tasks can be singled out separately: identification and elaboration of destructive patterns of behavior; development and strengthening of mature forms of interaction; clarification of hidden desires and their open discussion not only in therapy, but also in the family; achievement of mature forms of functioning of both the family as a whole and each individual member (individualization). It may seem that the therapist in this case is separating the family, but this is a false feeling. Family therapists strive, through achieving more mature forms of interaction, to achieve family cohesion, improve the quality of life of both the family as a whole and its individual members.

If you have any questions, you can ask me, and I am ready to answer them.

Mikhail Ozhirinsky is a psychoanatist, group analyst.

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