Structural Family Therapy Vs Bowen Intergenerational Therapy

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Working with the family has become one of my interested groups to work with in the future since the first day of Clinical Skills C class with specified family therapy. One of the vignettes, that we did the role-play in class was Hernandez family. I decided to do the comparison between two theories, Structural Family Therapy and Bowen Intergenerational Therapy, by working with this family.
This family are Hispanic, and their presenting problem is lack of communication, especially with the daughter who is 18-year-old and was diagnosed with anorexia 6 months before the first session. This family included 43-year-old father (AM) who works in IT, 42-year-old mother (AF) who is registered nurse, the son (CM) who is 21-year-old, studying engineering
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The change is achieved through therapeutic relationship, especially in this case because of all the conflict between family members. The therapist should have very strong relationship with each member of the family to bring each of them back to the session and also using insight will help the client to increase level of differentiation and especially tolerance for …show more content…
The therapist would utilize the coaching, relationship experiment, process question and especially in this case, encouraging differentiation of self by “I-position”. An example of “I-position” would be if CF were asked to express her feeling to her father regarding her hospitalization in Stanford straightforward and in such a way that took ownership for her feelings. One of the central beliefs of Bowenian therapy is about the differentiation of the family to the point that the therapist has achieved. However, it is essential for the therapist to be aware of their differentiation from their own family of origin by working on their own therapeutic sessions. The therapist would also offer coaching in session to help AF, AM, CM and CF move toward higher differentiation. The therapist would work to communicate two important lessons of differentiation to the client: intrapersonal in which the client is able to separate thoughts from feelings in order to respond instead of react, and interpersonal in which the client know where oneself ends and another begins without loosing of self. Bowenian therapist mostly focuses on relationship quality to improve it as well. In this case, the therapist should look at the parents and children

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