No Family is Perfect

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Many give credit to Salvador Munichin for being the founder of structural family therapy. As he embraced the ideal that children must go home and face the problems at home once they have fixed the problems at home, he began to see families as a whole in therapy. This being a new concept for many, he thus is one of the first therapists to work with families. Family structure is the organization of a family and the subsystems within them, as well as how boundaries are formed (p. 112). Minuchin studied family structure and attempted to change how families are organized, to thus change their interactions. There were many different types of organization within families and the subsystems within families have varied. Subsystems are formed and based off the different boundaries placed in family structure, which can be rigid enmeshed, or clear. For Minuchin, families that do not have structure and are not able to accommodate to changes within the structure, establish homeostasis, then they are dysfunctional. This paper will focus on my family dysfunction based on a structural family therapist’s perspective. I am a member of a family of four, my father, my mother, my brother, and myself. The structure and boundaries in my family system are not healthy. There should be clear boundaries in my family that place my parents on the top with all power, but my brother seems to have more power in my family. Reasons why we do not go certain places, arrive late, or go somewhere is usually based on how my brother feels. The executive subsystem, where the parental figures are supposed to be placed, are non-existent in my family structure. The purpose of the executive subsystem is to fun the family and manage the marriage with clear boundaries of the p... ... middle of paper ... .... The benefit to the family structure theory is that it is action based and focuses on breaking the family and making it new again. This is very much like scripture, as God often breaks people and then makes them new and into the way that they should be. One difficulty a therapist could have with this theory is resistance found in the family. However, I do believe, should that happen, the therapist would exclude the family from therapy until they were ready to work together. It is not an easy task to break and repair a family, I am starting to wonder why family therapists do not get paid as much as surgeons. Works Cited Nichols, M. P. (2014). Essentials of Family Therapy. College of William and Mary: Pearson Education Canada. Turner, Y., (12, February, 2014). Structural Family Therapy. Psychology of the Family, Eastern University, St. David’s, Pennsylvania.

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