Family Therapy Case Study

What life cycle stage are they in?

Both families are in the families with adolescents’ stage. They are couples who must take care of themselves, their relationship, and their teenagers (Gladding, 2015).

From a systemic perspective, how will you work with them?

Primary Family and The Neighbor’s Family-

If I was doing a family therapy for these client’s I think I would use Narrative Therapy. I would particularly like to use letters in my therapy and/or sessions. When reading the text, it explained how letters work in narrative therapy and I really liked this idea, especially for family therapy sessions. It explained how the therapist writes a letter to the family and I also would like the family to write letters to each other especially

This would empower each person and would allow them to express how they are feeling so that we can challenge those ideas and move forward together. Each member could play the opposite role and see how each member is struggling. I think this is a great way to discover family dynamics and the resources that they may have within their own family if they are willing to be real with each other. I like how the text referenced letters being like a case note meaning that as a therapist or counselor you can be very transparent (Gladding, 2015). I think transparency would be one of the most important factors in this case. Also, by developing a “preferred storyline” they could all play the part they wanted and intimately work better as a team. This is where I would incorporate solution focused family therapy. I would do so by establishing achievable goals. Achievable goals are emphasized, such as small changes in behavior that are seen as the basis for larger, systemic changes (Gladding, 2015). For the second family I can do the same thing, but would write a letter to the father who would be in jail. I would do the same techniques with this family too. As the therapist of this family I would give each client an empowering name in the letter, such as Barbra being the lost mother and Ricky being the caretaker. And again have them

I would do this by allowing them to see that they can reconstruct their own story together (Gladding, 2015). I think this would be very important for both families to do in this movie. Allowing them the freedom to reconstructing and deconstructing themselves as much as they would like after the tragedies that occurred for them. This empowers all members to make the changes they want to see in themselves and work as a team to help each other through this traumatic experience. This empowers all members to work as team and individual to keep each other accountable for making changes. As the book mentioned, problems should be worked on together as a team and in a cooperative manner (Gladding, 2015). The idea of “reauthoring” our own lives is empowering and can be very effective. We as human beings can always recreate, change, and grow for ourselves. I believe it is never too late to make the changes you want to see for yourself and I would explain this to all of the families involved. I would even want to bring the two families together at the end of the treatment if possible to help them process everything that happened. Allowing them time to heal and receive closure at this point. I also like the idea of giving the families an award at the end for the accomplishments that they have achieved (Gladding, 2015). It is a big step to becoming aware of ourselves and starting to make changes