Postmodern Approaches & Family Systems

Postmodern Approaches

Key Figures:

Insoo Kim Berg

Steve De Shazer

Michael White

David Epston

Postmodern Approach Therapy Goal:

Postmodern therapy focuses on deconstructing common beliefs and examining their value in an individual’s life.

Postmodern Approach Key Concepts:

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

Emphasizes strengths and resiliencies of people by focusing on exceptions

to their problems and their conceptualized solutions.

Narrative Therapy

Seeks to help people identify their values and the skills and

knowledge they have to live these values.

Postmodern Approach Techniques:

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

• Pre-therapy Change: Therapists elicit, evoke, and amplify what clients have already done to start making positive changes. This helps encourage clients to rely less on therapy and more on their resources to reach their goals.
• Exception Question: Questions about a client's past experience's when it would have been reasonable to expect problems to occur but they did not. This helps clients identify and examine the past exceptions, which helps clients work toward solutions.
• Miracle Question: Question that asks clients to consider that a miracle happens opens up the range of future possibilities. This helps shift the emphasis on past and current problems toward a more satisfying future.
• Scaling Questions: Questions used when change in experiences is not easily observed and assists clients in noticing that they are not defeated by their problems. This helps clients to pay closer attention to what they are doing and what steps they can take that lead to the changes they want.
• Formula First Session Task: A form of homework given to clients between the first and second session where the client is asked to observe things that happen in everyday life. In the second session, clients are asked what they saw and what they would like to see in the future. This helps give clients hope that change is inevitable and that its not if but when change will happen.
• Therapist Feedback to Client: Therapists give feed back to the client in three basic parts: compliments, a bridge, and suggesting a task. This addresses what clients need to do more of and differently to increase their chances of reaching their goals.

 Narrative Therapy

• Question and More Questions: Questions that help generate experience rather than gathering information. This helps clients to progressively discover or construct their experiences so they have a preferred sense of direction.
• Externalization and Deconstruction: Externalization allows clients to experience the problem outside of themselves and deconstruction allows clients to generate a more positive experience. This helps facilitate hope and allows clients take a stand against self-blame.
• Search for Unique Outcomes: Questions that are aimed at highlighting moments when the clients problem had not occurred or the problem had been dealt with successfully. This enables clients to see that change is possible.
• Alternative Stories and Reauthoring: The therapist listens for clues to competence in the midst of problematic stories and builds a story of competence around it. This helps clients remember, reclaim, and reinvent a richer, thicker, and more meaningful alternative story.
• Documenting the Evidence: The therapist writes letters that record the session, a description of the problem, and its influence on the client. These letters will include the client's strengths and abilities that were identified during the session. This helps highlight the struggle the client has had with the problem, draws distinction between the problem story and the new, preferred story. These letters can be read at different times, re-inspiring the client.

Family Systems Therapy

 Key Figures:

Alfred Adler, Murray Bowen, Virginia Satir

Carl Whitaker

Salvador Minuchin, Jay Haley, Cloe Madanes

Family Systems Therapy Viewpoints:

Adlerian Family Therapy

• Key Figure: Alfred Adler
• Time Focus: Present with some reference to the past.
• Therapy Goals: Enable parents as leaders; unlock mistaken goals and interactional patterns in the family; promotion of effective parenting.
• Role & Function of Therapist: Educator; motivational investigator; collaborator.
• Process of Change: Formation of relationship based on mutual respect; investigation o birth order and mistaken goals; re-education.
• Techniques & Innovations: Family constellation; typical day; goal disclosure; natural/logical consequences.

Multi-Generational Family Therapy

• Key Figure: Murray Bowen
• Time Focus: Present and past; family of origin; three generations.
• Therapy Goals: Differentiate the self; change the individual within the context of the system; decrease anxiety.
• Role & Function of Therapist: Guide, objective researcher, teacher; monitor of own reactivity.
• Process of Change: Questions and cognitive processes lead to differentiation and understanding of family origin.
• Techniques & Innovations: Genograms; dealing with family-of-origin issues; detriangulating relationships.

 Human Validation Process Model

• Key Figure: Virginia Satir
• Time Focus: Here and now.
• Therapy Goals: Promote growth, self-esteem, and connection; help family reach congruent communication and interaction.
• Role & Function of Therapist: Active facilitator; resource detective; model for congruence.
• Process of Change: Family is helped to move from status quo through chaos to new possibilities and new integrations.
• Techniques & Innovations: Empathy; touch, communication; sculpting; role playing; family-life chronology.

Experimental/Symbolic Family Therapy

• Key Figure: Carl Whitaker
• Time Focus: Present
• Therapy Goals: Promote spontaneity, creativity, autonomy, and ability to play.
• Role & Function of Therapist: Family coach; challenger; model for change through play.
• Process of Change: Awareness and seeds of change are planted in therapy confrontations.
• Techniques & Innovations: Co-therapy; self-disclosure; confrontation; use of self as change agent.

Structural Family Therapy

Key Figure: Salvador Minuchin

Time Focus: Present and past.

Therapy Goals: Restructure family organization; change dysfunctional transactional patterns.

Role & Function of Therapist: "Friendly Uncle"; stage manager; promoter of change in family structure.

Process of Change: Therapist joins the family in a leadership role; changes structure; sets boundaries.

Techniques & Innovations: Joining and accommodating; unbalancing; tracking; boundary making; enactments.

Strategic Family Therapy

• Key Figures: Jay Haley and Cloe Madanes
• Time Focus: Present and future.
• Therapy Goals: Eliminate presenting problem; change dysfunctional patterns; interrupt sequence.
• Role & Function of Therapist: Active director of change; problem solver.
• Process of Change: Change occurs through action-oriented directives and paradoxical interventions.
• Techniques & Innovations: Reframing; directives and paradox; amplifying; pretending; enactments.

In Family Systems Therapy, the members and systems are assessed based on power, alignment, organization, structure, development, culture, and gender.