Family Therapy Research Paper

Family Therapy Approaches That I Prefer
John Mack
MFCC/556
May 3, 2011
Professor Linda Hand, MFT

Family Therapy Approaches That I Prefer Family is the most important facet of human life. So when a family needs help it is important that the family’s therapist employs a style of therapy that the therapist believes in and has absolute confidence when using. I believe that the theoretical approaches utilized by a therapist must match the way the therapist handles his/her own issues in life. That is why I will be using a combination of cognitive behavioral, narrative, and solution-focused therapy in my future endeavors with troubled families. As I have progressed through my academic program my style of counseling has taken form.
The first piece of my personal theoretical style will include cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for families. I trust CBT as a useful tool for family therapy because CBT has worked for me. Throughout life I have been called a thinker and a rationalist. I have personally used techniques such as cognitive rehearsal and modeling which do involve thinking through a problem and rationalizing the reality of the situation. I have used cognitive rehearsal with myself using self-talk and the process has been very effective in preparing me to face the same problem when it arises again. Another effective technique that has been effective for me through self-talk is disruption of irrational beliefs. Some other powerful techniques that I have used and found effective are charting, journaling, and modeling. CBT is a powerful therapeutic style but there are a couple of shortcomings that will prevent me from solely using cognitive behavior therapy for families. Sometimes CBT can seem mechanistic, sterile, or even impersonal. CBT is also short-term in nature and therapy cannot be discontinued before the families desired goals are achieved or at least on the correct path for healing. Nevertheless, CBT is extremely powerful when used in combination with other theoretical approaches. Narrative therapy is the first theoretical approach that I will utilize alongside CBT to help troubled families. Narrative therapy is somewhat like CBT in the fact that there is a lot of mental imaging and mental rationalization involved yet still has its own niche that can minimize the sterile and mechanistic qualities of CBT. The idea of narrative therapy is to talk about problems in the form of a story, discover alternatives to the story, and retell it with a different outcome. A powerful example would be re-storying. It is when a therapist co-authors a story with the clients using the families own style of language. Then the therapist engages the family in a “what if” type of discussion to try to find acceptable alternatives to the story. This keeps the therapy fresh and the family involved. This technique can be fun for the whole family while keeping everybody engaged and eliminating sterile and mechanistic qualities that are sometimes found in CBT. In narrative therapy the therapist is required to be a little more involved in the session which fits my personal style because I believe that a therapist should be involved in the client guiding process as much as the therapist deems it necessary.
Even though the goal for therapy is to help the client discover an alternate narrative for their story the therapist is still very involved in the process. The therapist stays busy helping the client thicken the plot of their stories around alternative accounts of their identity and relational narratives. The therapist is very active in trying to assist clients in creating authoring of their stories, assisting the client in changing their lives by changing their stories, and helping clients externalize their problems so that they can better solve
them. I am a firm believer in narrative therapy but there are a couple of things that scare me away from solely using narrative therapy within my practice. The first and most important is that the therapists own personal views can influence the interpretation of therapy. This can lead to ineffective therapy and do the client more harm than good. Another issue that I have with narrative therapy is that I believe that sometimes externalization of the client’s problems and taking the stance that the problem is not part of the client may not encourage the client to take responsibility for their issues. Solution-focused therapy is an approach that I will employ along with CBT and narrative therapy in my future work.
I have found solution-focused therapy to be very effective in my personal life and I completely believe in its effectiveness. The goal of therapy is to help clients to shift their language from talking about problems to talking about solutions for the problem. This theory seems simple but most people overlook the obvious especially when in troublesome situations. I believe this method to be effective and at the same time ad some flavor and fun to therapy. An example of this would be using the techniques of asking the miracle question. This allows the client to see the better side of an issue while giving the therapist pertinent information about the client’s desires and what direction therapy should go. Overall I believe solution-focused therapy emphasizes positive attributes of clients and it can be used with a wide variety of clients and issues. I think solution-focused therapy is an appropriate tool to be used along with CBT and narrative
therapy. There are a couple of issues with solution-focused therapy that can be negative for the family. This theory is solution focused rather than problem focused and it does have limitations with multicultural clients. Most importantly it can de-value the client’s expressions of negative emotions and that can be detrimental to a positive therapeutic outcome. I believe that everything about a client is equally important when it comes to psychotherapy. Family therapy is extremely complex because no one family is alike. Families enter therapy with a vast range of differences such as age, sex, religion, culture, and problems. So it is vital that a therapist be educated in and prepared to use more than one theoretical approach to help a family in need. That is why I will be using a combination of cognitive behavioral, narrative, and solution-focused therapy in my future work with families.