Structural Family Therapy (SFT)

Brief History:

The school of family therapy chosen to review and apply to the Aleppo families’ case study, is known as Structural Family Therapy or SFT. Structural family therapy was created by Salvador Minuchin, he was born in Argentina and served in the Israeli Army, he passed away in October 2017 in the United States at the age of 96. (Everipedia, 2017) He travelled to the United States and trained in child psychiatry. Salvador evolved on his method of therapy while working at The New York School for Problematic Boys, in the 1960’s. By the 1970’s his mode of therapy had become one of the worlds widely practiced therapy’s. This method of therapy is used to address the problems of functioning present in family systems. This type of therapy

He also emphasized that human experience has 2 elements, the element of belonging, and the element of being separate/individualised. This mode of therapy can be distinguished as having emphasis on the family structure, in the context of the therapy settings. This kind of therapy does not seek to create new structures within a family, but it aims to reform the structures which work best for the family. “The family structure is the invisible set of functional demands, which organises how the family members interact” (Minuchin, 1974). Some of the invisible sets of functional demands within a family include: collations, power and hierarchy and boundaries in the family subsystem. Family boundaries may be clear, normal, weak, diffuse or rigid. The therapist must try to restructure the system, by observation and manipulation of interactions within a session. Behavioural sequences form a basis for hypotenuse of the families structure. Enactments and interactions are suggested to the family by the therapist as a way of understanding and diagnosing the structure, this provides a room for re-structuring and intervention within the family’s system. Structural Family therapy is systemic as it idealises that the best way to positively affect an individual is to influence change for the entire system (Bishop,

In Structural Family Therapy, a therapist would be recognised as belonging to this school as they would work with the family closely, on where dysfunctions in the system are present, they do so by creating new patterns of interaction within the family. When the new pattern are repeated within a family, this will improve the context of the system. By stabilising and replacing the old unhelpful patterns and symptoms within the system, it is able to reduce or eliminate the families dysfunctionality Some of the things a Structural Family Therapist can be seen doing include, maintaining a focus on altering the dysfunctional family’s structure by creating effective hierarchy’s. A Structural Family Therapist views problems as failures with adjusting to change. The therapists role is not to solve the problem, instead it’s to allow the family to take control of their own problem, and work together to solve the conflicts within the system. The family is seen as their own expert to their situation, not the therapist. In therapy the therapist assists the family to strengthen boundaries in the enmeshed relationships and weaken the boundaries in the disengaged relationships. (Nichols, M. P., & Schwartz, R. 2008). A SFT