Selected Essays And Book Reviews
COUN 601 - Marriage and Family Counseling
Lesson 22. Experiential Family Counseling {673 words}
1. Discuss the definitions of experiential family counseling.
A. Existential Encounter - believed to be the essential healing force in the therapy process, whereby the therapist establishes a caring, person-to-person relationship with each member, while modeling openness, honesty, and spontaneity. This is where everyone actually connect.
B. Family Myths - a set of beliefs based on a distortion of historical reality shared by all family members. These help shape the rules governing the family. These are also unspoken rules that may have developed over multiple generations and become embedded into the family.
C. Family Sculpting - a non-verbal experiential technique in which family members position themselves in a tableau that reveals significant aspects of their perceptions and feelings. The therapist sculpts the family and has them sculp each other. They can sculpt one member stabbing another in the back. The husband can sculpt the wife on her knees in submission to him. Sculpting can create a lot of energy and be a very, very, very powerful tool. Note that enacting shows drama over time while sculpting is like a still picture.
D. Mystification - R. D. Laing's concept that many families distort their children's experience by denying or labeling it. This can really take power from the developing child, and it can cause the child to feel unimportant.
E. Self-Actualization - the process of developing and fulfilling innate, positive potentialities. Part of experiential philosophy is to encourage members to fill their innate potential.
2. Discuss the basic premises of Experiential Family Therapy. This theory has been greatly influenced by humanistic, existential, and phenomenological theories. A basic premise is a commitment to individual awareness, self-expression, and self-actualization. The therapist promotes individuals and families to be aware, be able to express, and grow. This is what the theory stresses. However, it is a little atheoretical because not many of these therapists have done much writing about the theory. They consider such writing to be very limiting.
3. Discuss normal family development. Families develop in five ways. First, healthy families support individual growth and normal development. Second, they permit and encourage a wide range of experiences, but that does not mean actions without boundaries. Third, they allow for privacy and individuality. Even kids need space. Fourth, there needs to be a connection between the family members. Fifth, if the family is secure and can be honest, it will allow free expression of feelings and individuality.
4. Discuss the cause of dysfunctional families (according to this approach). Dysfunctional families result when (a) families resist an awareness of their feelings, (b) families are not honest and genuine, and (3) families limit the range of experience. Children who have greater ranges for experience have been shown to have higher IQs. An understanding of these ideas can be helpful when trying to integrate counseling theories with Christianity.
5. Discuss the goals of experiential family counseling. First is to increase personal integrity by encouraging people to be more congruent in their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Second is to encourage greater freedom of choice for family members. Third is to teach them to be less dependent and make members be more independent (not in a radical way but in moderation). Fourth is expanded emotional experiencing, where the therapist tries to increase the individual's ability to experience things emotionally. Therapists like to put families on the hot seat, like in family sculpting, in order to see all the pathologies and help them deal with them. This approach focuses on the emotional aspects of the family members because many families naturally cut off emotions.
Tom of Bethany
"He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." (I John 5:12)
"And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart." (Jeremiah 29:13)
Index to Selected Essays And Book Reviews
GLA 5. Reaction Journal to "The Process of Change"
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