Importance Of Structural Family Therapy

Register to read the introduction… To have lasting structural change in family, structural family therapists help families to transform their family structure. By joining with and accommodating the family, therapists use enactment to observe problematic family patterns. Therapists also help families using thoughtfully planned therapeutic techniques to create an effective hierarchical structure in family. The challenge of restructuring requires joining, with the family and turning and responding to people according to the way they move. Therapists draw a family maps, an organizational scheme to clarify the concept of a family organism as a structure to see the relationship between an individual's behavior and the structure of the relationships in the whole family.
In order to help families with problems, therapists must understand how the families view the problems. Then, the family therapist reframes their formulation into one based on an understanding of family structure. Its use of enactment within the therapy session to promote the reframing makes this therapy unique. Structural therapists work with what actually happens in the session, rather than what family members describe about their problems. Also, by taking an active role in therapy session, therapists work and deal with family dynamics (Nichols & Schwartz, …show more content…
In structural family therapy, each family member is compared to a puzzle in which each individual self defines the others and the whole defines the self. The parts complete the whole, and the whole complete the parts. While family members are trapped in self-defeating patterns, they are also showing the emotions such as support, love, and caring. Through such emotions families are build up their relationship to become as a whole. Therapists can help families to focus on helping them to see the broader context of the family self by accepting both possibilities and limitations of self and other

References
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Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Minuchin, S., Montalvo, B., Guerney, B., Rosman, B. & Schumer, F. (1967). Families of the slums. New York: Basic Books