Chapters 10–12
Be familiar with family coalitions
-p.284.Coalitions are alliances between specific family members against a third member. Stable coalition – a fixed and inflexible union that becomes a dominant part of the family’s everyday functioning. Detouring coalition – is one in which the pair hold a third family member responsible for their difficulties or conflicts with one another, thus decreasing the stress on themselves or their relationship.
Understand the emphasis of structural therapists
p.293 Focuses on the active, organized wholeness of the family unit and the ways in which the family organizes itself through its transactional patterns. The family’s subsystems, boundaries, alignments, and coalitions are studied. It is geared to present day transactions and gives higher priority to action than to insight or understanding. All behavior, including symptoms in the identified patient, is viewed within the context of family structure. Interventions are active, carefully calculated, even manipulative efforts to alter rigid, outmoded, or unworkable structures. To achieve such changes, families are helped to renegotiate outmoded rules and to seek greater boundary clarity.
Know characteristics and interventions of psychosomatic families
p.276. Minuchin, Bernice Rosman, Lester Baker. Families of children who manifest severe psychosomatic symptoms are characterized by certain transactional problems that encourage somatization. Enmeshment is common, subsystems function poorly, and boundaries between family members are too diffuse to allow for individual autonomy. A psychosomatic family was found to be overprotective, inhibiting the child from developing a sense of independence, competence or interest in activities outside the safety of the family. Symptoms have a regulating effect on the family system. Help family develop clearer boundaries, learn to negotiate for desired changes, and deal more directly with hidden, underlying