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Family Therapy : The Key Objectives Of Therapists

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The first session we met we discussed the purpose of family therapy introducing the concept to see it was something they may find beneficial to them. Understanding how family therapy works and interacts is the key objectives of therapists; they should be healers, concerned with engaging with the family therapeutically, around issues that cause problems whilst remaining respect. This means to join families and experience the reality whilst becoming involved in the interaction which form the family structure and the way they think and behave (Minuchin and Fisherman 1981). Information was given about structural family therapy and how this may be beneficial for family A. Mrs A was given information on how Family therapy can play an …show more content…

Kuipers and Bebbington (2005) recognise that looking after someone with a mental illness is emotionally demanding and often results in feelings of resentment for the caring role, this often made Mrs A irritated and blame Mr A for his problems and becoming critical of him. Research has shown that family therapy can be helpful in families with high expressed emotion to help reduce relapse rates. This has usually been with interventions such as psycho education and by using a problem solving approach with a link between the impact of care and expressed emotion (Smith et al 1993). A consistent finding within research is that both expressed emotion and burden are more dependent on the persons problems than on the deficits (Raune et al 2004). It was discussed that with this in mind Mr and Mrs A would find alternative ways of coping with his issues rather than resulting in conflict as both would have a better understanding of his problems.
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Structural family therapy was founded by Salvador Minuchin and has been the principal model in family therapy since the 1960’s

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