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, 1995). A. Although concepts such as boundaries, subsystems, hierarchy, and coalitions are popular concepts of structural family therapy, the revisionists of this therapy insist that this popular view of the therapy is inadequate. They argue that the abovementioned concepts cannot account for the way in which structural family therapy is practiced. Family functioning is not explained by the use of structural ideas. Therefore, to clarify and distinguish the practice of structural family therapy from the therapeutic practice of others, enactment is used. Aponte mentioned how important role is to structural therapy by comparing what transference is to psychoanalysis. However, this does not acknowledge the pivotal role played by the assumptions of therapy and uniqueness in determining the way in which structural family therapy is practiced. The revisionists have tried to correct the distortions of the popular concepts of the therapy since structural family therapy is more complex than people realize (Simon, 1995). relationship stemming from family structure. …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
Aponte, H.J. (1998). Love, the spiritual wellspring of forgiveness: and example of spirituality in therapy. The Association for Family Therapy and Systematic Practice, 20, 37-58.
Balswick, J.O., & Balswick, J.K. (1998). The family: A Christian perspectives on the contemporary home. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.
Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Minuchin, S. & Fisherman, H.C. (1981). Family therapy techniques. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press.
Minuchin, S., Montalvo, B., Guerney, B., Rosman, B. & Schumer, F. (1967). Families of the slums. New York: Basic Books (192-243). Minuchin, S. & Nichols, M.P. (1993). Family healing: Tales of Hope and Renewal from Framily Therapy. New York: The Free Press. Nichols, M. & Schwartz, R. (1995). Family therapy: Concepts and methods. Boston:Allyn and Bacon. Simon, G. M. (1995). A revisionist rendering of structural family therapy. Journal of Marital and family therapy, 21, 17-26.