Unbalancing Techniques In Family Therapy

1. Choose two techniques or approaches often employed in family/couple therapy and compare them. Your answer must include differences between the two interventions you chose in terms of “the focus of intervention” and “how to treat.”

• Unbalancing
 Unbalancing is when the therapist deliberately sides with a less powerful member or sub-system of the family, thereby unbalancing the family. This forces the family to restructure. Places emphasis on the realignment of relationships in subsystems. The therapist joins one individual or subsystem to upset the status quo.

• Intensity
 Intensity is when the therapist does something dramatic to get the family’s attention. This includes changing time, changing distance, using repetition, resisting the family’s pull, ect. This encourages talk and discussion within the family. It’s a sort of indirect way of getting the family to do or say something that can be discussed and studied.

• Both of these techniques are ways that the therapist can immediately cause change or initiate a situation or confrontation. Both of these techniques are almost invasive of the family system and are both disruptive. Even though these seem quite similar, they have their differences. While intensity is indirect, unbalancing is direct. Unbalancing is more …show more content…
This aids group members in understanding how others view them or how others feel towards them. The best way to train yourself to be aware of this process in the group is to simply think “here-and-now”. As you think this way, the actual words being spoken will begin to fade into importance. What will begin to speak will be the voice tones, the body language, and your own visceral response to all these nonverbal events. Group members can be expected to attend to and talk about the same kinds of responses in themselves, to begin to be more interested in how the group deals with an issue than they are in the issue