Family Systems Vocabulary

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clinical intervention where the family therapist offers a message to the family which is both internally inconsistent and contradictory. Their intent is to challenge the rigid perceptions or perturbing and unbalancing the system.

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Paradoxical Directive

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Theoretical movement that emerged in family therapy field in the 70's and 80's. The approach believes that there is an experiental base of reality/learning; that therapy should be non-normative; that there is no absolute truth and theories are our best description of what we think reality is. The postmodern approach is more eclectic and tries to incorporate ideas outside family therapy. Constructivism, an aspect of the PM movement, views reality as interpretive, not fact.

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Post-modernism

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A concept from family theory which descirbes predictable patterns or cycles as a family progresses through developmental stages. Such stages may include: separation from family of origin, marriage, child bearing, child rearing, divorce, reitrement, aging, and death. The therapist attempts to normalize the family's presenting problem in the context of the family's respective developmental stage.

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Family Life Cycle

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Assumes it is possible to achieve objective knowledge of the world. From this perspective, one seeks universal codes, structures, and essences which are assumed to exist "out there" independent of observers. The goal is to discover, map, and objectively know the truth of the world and human behavior. Is normative, describes the therapist as the expert.

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Modernism

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A clinical intervention that takes the form of paradox and double bind. A therapist instructs a family member to enact a symptomatic behavior, which creates the expectation that an "involuntary" behavior will become voluntary. The person may acknowledge that the behavior is involuntary or simply give up the symptom. An example of prescribing the symptom is telling an overprotective mother to take better care of her child.

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Prescribe the symptom

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For the social constructionist, language is not a reporting device for our experience, or representationalism. Rather it is a defining framework for our experiences. Thus a change in language equals a change in the experience. The social constructivist believes reality cannot be experienced directly.
Views reality as subjective; believes that society gives meaning to something, with language and the role of discourse bing the focus. Applied to therapy: In therapy we bring into the session our own meanings and understanding;
primary goal is to deconstruct so-called facts by delinieating the assumptions, values, and ideologies upon which they rest.

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Social Constructivism

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Instead of studying objects and people discretely or in isolation, systemic therapies study them in relationship. The systems perspective would have us see each member of a family in relation to other family members, as each affects and is affected by the other persons.

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systemic therapies

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A model intended to assist the family therapist in recognizing the impact of differening gender role socialization for men and women, of the differences in each gender's access to economic and social resources, and the primary role that women have been socialized to perform in family relations and child-bearing.

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Feminist Theory

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A concept from systems theory and epistomology which asserts that reality is created through the process of interacting with one's environment rather than by discovery, that reality is constructed in one's mind through perturbations from the environment. In contrast, the traditional scientific method asserts that an objective reality is an actuality independent of one's existence, and social constructionism view the construction of reality emerging from social interchange and mediated through language.
i.e constructivists believe that in the process of perceiving and describing an experience, we construct our reality as well as our personal knowledge base about reality.

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Constructivism