[[Structural Family Therapy]] ## Diagnosing - Not the same as DSM - The goal is to describe the systematic interrelationships of ALL family members to see what needs to be changed or modified for the family to improve ## Family Mapping - Using diagrams to describe ways that families relate to each other - Typical family mapping questions: - Who makes the decisions in your family, enforces the rules, breaks the rules? - When did you start treating your child as a substitute spouse? - When did you start treating your child as your best friend? - Do you often go to your parents for help or are you ready to handle things on your own? When do you think you will be competent enough to do that? - What are some of the things you do alone without the children? ## Compliments - Can be used for reframing - Can be used to see if anyone in the family will challenge the compliment ## Disequilibrium techniques - to create a different perception of reality and used to create a different sequence of events ### (1) Reframing - A process in which a perception is changed bye explaining a situation in terms of a different context - Allows family members to change their attitude toward the individual, allows family members to be more accommodating ### (2) Restructuring - To make the family more functional by altering the existing the hierarchy and interaction patterns so that problems are not maintained - Enactments - asking the family to enact a transaction in the session so the therapist can observe - asking them to push past thresholds - or perhaps asking them to try a new interaction pattern - Unbalancing - therapist aligns with one family member or subsystem to support them against the rest of the family - Boundary Formation