Structural Family Therapy Summary

The evolution of “The structural Family Therapy,” was researched by a team of therapists and researchers that was led by Salvador Minuchin; in the early 1960’s. Minuchin’s research was done in an institutional correctional facility for young delinquents, which Minuchin transformed this delinquent institutional setting into a family oriented treatment program (Guise, 2015).
Structural family therapy is a strength-based, outcome oriented treatment modality based on eco-systemic principles. A) The principle of behavior is a function of our relations with others. The structural therapist focuses on what is taking place among people, rather than on individual psyches, which is the context that organizes a person. B) The family is the primary
Subsystems can be determined by generation, role, gender, age, or interest. Each individual is a part of many subsystems. For example, the man can be the father, brother, sibling, or uncle. If he is mature, he will be able to vary his behavior to fit each subsystem (Guise, 2015). Then there are boundaries. Individuals, subsystems, and families are separated from one another by boundaries. Boundary is a hypothetical line of demarcation that serves to protect the autonomy of a family and its subsystems by managing proximity and hierarchy. These boundaries can labelled as a clear boundary or rigid boundary depending on how the family structure work through time of the beginning when the family first start and how the parents lay out the structure as the children grow and how the relationship of the husband’s and wife’s supporting of each other is. If they work together, with raising a family, the structuring of rules that’s positive and nurturing or if they don’t work together and there’s unbalance of making the rules of raising the
Typically, children in these families learn to be self-sufficient and resourceful. In the extreme, the families are not warm or nurturing. They do not seek treatment until they face exceedingly stressful problems. Conversely, children from enmeshed families with diffuse boundaries receive affection and nurturance, but it can be at the expense of autonomy and, perhaps, the ability to relate to others outside the family (Guise, 2015). To understand autonomy; it is a personality trait characterized by a focus on personal achievement in dependence, and a preference for solitude, of the labeled as an opposite of sociotropy (Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, 2015). Typically, people with sociotropy tend to have a strong need for social acceptance, which causes them to be overly nurturing towards people who they do not have close relationships with. Sociotropy can be seen as the opposite of autonomy. People with sociotropy are concerned with interpersonal relationships, whereas those with autonomy are more concerned with independence and do not care so much for others (Sato, McCann, & Ferguson_Isaac, 94). Sociotropy is notable in that it interacts with interpersonal stress or traumatic experience to influence subsequent depression (Needleman,