Postmodern Approaches and Family Systems Therapy

Postmodern Approaches

Key Figures:

1. Steve de Shazer
2. Insoo Kim Berg
3. Michael White
4. David Epston

Goals:

Helping clients understand that they are the true experts of their own lives in dealing with mental health issues.

Techniques:

1. Narrative Therapy — evaluates a patient’s thoughts and behaviors in the context of their culture and the story they have written for themselves
2. Solution-Focused Therapy — a short-term approach that focuses on creating solutions to problems rather than evaluating the root causes of those problems
3. Collaborative Language Systems — solves problems through talk and collaboration

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family Systems Therapy

Key Figures:

1. Alfred Adler
2. Murray Bowen
3. Virginia Satir
4. Carl Whitaker
5. Salvador Minuchin
6. Jay Haley
7. Cloe Madanes

Goals:

1. Helping family members gain awareness of patterns of relationships that are not working well and create new ways of interacting to relieve their distress.
2. Resolving the specific problem that brings the family to therapy.

Techniques:  

1. Targeting behavior change, perceptual change, or both.
2. Using genograms, teaching, asking questions, family scuppting, joining the family, tracking sequences, issuing directives, anchoring, use of countertransference, family mapping, refraining, paradoxical interventions, restructuring, enactments, and setting boundaries.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Reality Therapy and Feminist Therapy

Cognitive Behavior Therapy

Key Figure:

A.T. Beck

Goals:

1. To challenge clients to confront faulty beliefs with contradictory evidence that they gather and evaluate.
2. Helping clients seek out their dogmatic beliefs and vigorously minimize them.
3. To become aware of automatic thoughts and to change them.

Techniques:

1. Engaging in Socratic dialogue.
2. Debating irrational beliefs
3. Carrying out homework assignments
4. Gathering data on assumptions one has made.
5. Keeping a record of activities.
6. Forming alternative interpretations.
7. Learning new coping skills.
8. Changing one's language and thinking patterns.
9. Role playing.
10. Imagery
11. Confronting faulty beliefs.

 

Reality Therapy

Key Figures:

1. William Glasser
2. Robert Wubbolding

Goals:

1. To help people become more effective in meeting their needs.
2. To enable clients to get reconnected with the people they have chosen to put into their quality worlds and teach clients choice theory.

Techniques:

Various techniques may be used to get clients to evaluate what they are presently doing to see if they are willing to change. If they decide that their present behaviors not effective, they develop a specific plan for change and make a commitment to follow through.

Feminist Therapy

Key Figures:

1. Jean Baker Miller
2. Carolyn Zerbe Enns
3. Oliva Espin
4. Laura Brown

Goals:

1. To bring about transformation both in the individual client and in society.
2. For individual clients the goal is to assist them in recognizing, claiming, and using their personal power to free themselves from the limitations of gender role socialization.
3. To confront all forms of institutional policies that discriminate on the basis of gender.

Techniques:

Feminist practitioners tent to employ consciousness raising techniques aimed at helping clients recognize the impact of gender-role socialization on their lives. Other techniques frequently used include gender-role analysis and intervention, power analysis and intervention, bibliotherapy, journal writing, therapist self-disclosure, assertiveness training, reframing and relabeling, cognitive restructuring, identifying and challenging untested beliefs, role playing, psychodramatic methods, group work and social action.

Person-centered, Gestalt and Behavior Therapy

Person-centered Therapy

Key Figures:

Founder: Carl Rogers
Natalie Rogers

Goals:

1. To provide a safe climate conducive to clients' self-exploration, so that they can recognize blocks to growth and can experience aspects of self that were formerly denied or distorted.

2. To enable them to move toward openness, greater trust in self, willingness to be a process, and increased spontaneity and aliveness.

Techniques:

Active listening and hearing, reflection of feelings, clarification, and "being there" for the client.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gestalt Therapy

Key Figures:

Founders: Fritz Perls and Laura Perls
Miriam Polster and Erving Polster

Goals:

1. To assist clients in gaining awareness of moment-to-moment experiencing
2. To expand the capacity to make choices. Aim not to analysis but at integration.

Techniques:

Experiments are co-created by therapist and client through I/Thou dialogue. Therapists have latitude to invent their own experiments. Formal diagnosis and testing are not a required part of therapy.

Behavior Therapy

Key Figures:

B.F. Skinner
Arnold Lazarus
Albert Bandura

Goals:

1. To eliminate maladaptive behaviors and learn more effective behaviors.
2. To focus on factors influencing behavior and find what can be done about problematic behavior.

Techniques:

The main techniques are systematic desensitization, relaxation methods, flooding, eye movement and desensitization reprocessing, reinforcement techniques, modeling, cognitive restructuring, assertion and social skills training, self management programs, behavioral rehearsal, coaching, and various multimodal therapy techniques. Diagnosis or assessment is done at the outset to determine a treatment plan. Questions are used, such as "what" "how" and "when" but not "why". Contracts and homework assignments are also typically used.
 

Psychoanalytic, Adlerian and Existential Theories

Psychoanalytic Theory

Key Concepts:
1. Working through repressed memories.
2. The unconscious mind.
3. Psychosexual stages
4. ID, Ego and Superhero

Key Figures:
Sigmund Freud

The Goals:
1. Helping people sort through their unconscious mind and retrieve what was lost.
2. To become more self aware.

Techniques:
1. Free association
2. Dream analysis
3. Analysis of transference
4. Analysis of resistance

 

Adlerian Theory

Key Concepts:
1. Assuming responsibility for one's own self.
2. Creating one's own destiny.
3. Having goals.
4. Having good relationships with others.

Key Figures:
Alfred Adler

Goals:

1. To help people create goals and achieve them.

2. To show a person a positive lifestyle.

 

Techniques:

1. Engagement

2. Assessment

3. Insight

4. Reorientation

 

 

 

Existential Theory

Key Concepts:

1.Self-awareness.

2. Freedom and responsibility.

3. Establishing an identity and meaningful relationships.

4. Finding meaning.

5. Anxiety is unavoidable.

 

Key Figures:

1. Viktor Frankl

2. Rollo May

3. Irvin Yalom

 

Goals:

To understand the subjective world of the client and to help them come to new understandings and new options and to be fully aware of their feelings and actions in the present, confront their anxiety, and develop a genuine relationship with themselves and with the world around them.