Structural Changes In Family Therapy

In the mid 1900’s family therapy became known as a revolutionary approach to treatment which has helped therapists to better understand the family structure as well as individuals within the family (Corey). For therapists to provide the best treatment for individual clients they have learned that any change the individual may need would be easily made if the therapist took the family and the set of relationships into consideration. Previous studies show that every person is impacted by their environment both mentally and emotionally which are two main life aspects therapists work with. In order to provide the services one is looking for in a therapist, the therapist should understand every aspect of the client’s life and take into consideration …show more content…
This theory was first brought about by Salvador Minuchin when he was conducting research with delinquent boys who came from poor families in New York (Corey). The usual client in this study was the “urban, minority group member who is experiencing poverty, discrimination, fear, crowdedness, and street-living,” and the family was typically underorganized (Minuchin).
From these ideas structural-strategic approaches stemmed and include an approach involving joining, boundary setting, unbalancing, reframing, ordeals, paradoxical inventions and enactments. This gave therapists the opportunity to break the family down into subsystems in order to better understand and answer the questions that structural strategic therapy asks. All of the research done by Minuchin and most other structural family therapists originated in financially deprived families and was done with an array of multicultural families. However the first studies were primarily focusing on Hispanic and African-American