Summary of Theories and Techniques
(references:)
| Theoretical Model | Theorists | Summary | Techniques |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adlerian Family Therapy | Alfred Adler | Also known as "Individual Psychology". Sees the person as a whole. Ideas include compensation for feelings of inferiority leading to striving for significance toward a fictional final goal with a private logic. Birth order and mistaken goals are explored to examine mistaken motivations of children and adults in the family constellation. | Psychoanalysis, Typical Day, Reorienting, Re-educating |
| Attachment Theory | John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth | Individuals are shaped by their experiences with caregivers in the first three years of life. Used as a foundation for Object Relations Theory. The Strange Situation experiment with infants involves a systematic process of leaving a child alone in a room in order to assess the quality of their parental bond. | Psychoanalysis, Play Therapy |
| Bowenian Family Systems | Murray Bowen, Betty Carter, Philip Guerin, Michael Kerr, Thomas Fogarty, Monica McGoldrick, Edwin Friedman, Daniel Papero | Also known as "Intergenerational Family Therapy" (although there are also other schools of intergenerational family therapy). Family members are driven to achieve a balance of internal and external differentiation, causing anxiety, triangulation, and emotional cutoff. Families are affected by nuclear family emotional processes, sibling positions and multigenerational transmission patterns resulting in an undifferentiated family ego mass. | Detriangulation, Nonanxious Presence, Genograms, Coaching |
| Cognitive Behavioral Family Therapy | John Gottman, Albert Ellis, Albert Bandura | Problems are the result of operant conditioning that reinforces negative behaviors within the family’s interpersonal social exchanges that extinguish desired behavior and promote incentives toward unwanted behaviors. This can lead to irrational beliefs and a faulty family schema. | Therapeutic Contracts, Modeling, Systematic Desensitization, Shaping, Charting, Examining Irrational Beliefs |
| Collaborative Language Systems | Harry Goolishian, Harlene Anderson, Tom Andersen, Lynn Hoffman, Peggy Penn | Individuals form meanings about their experiences within the context of social relationship on a personal and organizational level. Collaborative therapists help families reorganize and dis-solve their perceived problems through a transparent dialogue about inner thoughts with a "not-knowing" stance intended to illicit new meaning through conversation. Collaborative therapy is an approach that avoids a particular theoretical perspective in favor of a client-centered philosophical process. | Dialogical Conversation, Not Knowing, Curiosity, Being Public, Reflecting Teams |
| Communications Approaches | Virginia Satir, John Banmen, Jane Gerber, Maria Gomori | All people are born into a primary survival triad between themselves and their parents where they adopt survival stances to protect their self-worth from threats communicated by words and behaviors of their family members. Experiential therapists are interested in altering the overt and covert messages between family members that affect their body, mind and feelings in order to promote congruence and to validate each person’s inherent self-worth. | Equality, Modeling Communication, Family Life Chronology, Family Sculpting, Metaphors, Family Reconstruction |
| Contextual Therapy | Ivan Böszörményi-Nagy | Families are built upon an unconscious network of implicit loyalties between parents and children that can be damaged when these "relational ethics" of fairness, trust, entitlement, mutuality and merit are breached. | Rebalancing, Family Negotiations, Validation, Filial Debt Repayment |
| Emotion-Focused Therapy | Sue Johnson, Les Greenberg | Couples and families can develop rigid patterns of interaction based on powerful emotional experiences that hinder emotional engagement and trust. Treatment aims to enhance empathic capabilities of family members by exploring deep-seated habits and modifying emotional cues. | Reflecting, Validation, Heightening, Reframing, Restructuring |
| Experiential Family Therapy | Carl Whitaker, David Kieth, Laura Roberto, Walter Kempler, John Warkentin, Thomas Malone, August Napier | Stemming from Gestalt foundations, change and growth occurs through an existential encounter with a therapist who is intentionally "real" and authentic with clients without pretense, often in a playful and sometimes absurd way as a means to foster flexibility in the family and promote individuation. | Battling, Constructive Anxiety, Redefining Symptoms, Affective Confrontation, Co-Therapy, Humor |
| Feminist Family Therapy | Sandra Bern, | Complications from social and political disparity between genders are identified as underlying causes of conflict within a family system. Therapists are encouraged to be aware of these influences in order to avoid perpetuating hidden oppression, biases and cultural stereotypes and to model an egalitarian perspective of healthy family relationships. | Demystifying, Modeling, Equality, Personal Accountability |
| Milan Systemic Family Therapy | Luigi Boscolo, Gianfranco Cecchin, Mara Selvini Palazzoli, Giuliana Prata | A practical attempt by the "Milan Group" to establish therapeutic techniques based on Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics that disrupts unseen systemic patterns of control and games between family members by challenging erroneous family beliefs and reworking the family’s linguistic assumptions. | Hypothesizing, Circular Questioning, Neutrality, Counterparadox |
| Medical Family Therapy | George Engel, Susan McDaniel, Jeri Hepworth & William Doherty | Families facing the challenges of major illness experience a unique set of biological, psychological and social difficulties that require a specialized skills of a therapist who understands the complexities of the medical system, as well as the full spectrum of mental health theories and techniques. | Grief Work, Family Meetings, Consultations, Collaborative Approaches |
| MRI Brief Therapy | Gregory Bateson, Milton Erickson, Heinz von Foerster | Established by the Mental Research Institute (MRI) as a synthesis of ideas from multiple theorists in order to interrupt misguided attempts by families to create first and second order change by persisting with "more of the same," mixed signals from unclear metacommunication and paradoxical double-bind messages. | Reframing, Prescribing the Symptom, Relabeling, Restraining (Going Slow), Bellac Ploy |
| Narrative Therapy | Michael White, David Epston | People use stories to make sense of their experience and to establish their identity as a social and political constructs based on local knowledge. Narrative therapists avoid marginalizing their clients by positioning themselves as a co-editor of their reality with the idea that "the person is not the problem, but the problem is the problem." | Deconstruction, Externalizing Problems, Mapping, Asking Permission |
| Object Relations Therapy | Hazan & Shaver, David Scharff & Jill Scharff, James Framo, | Individuals choose relationships that attempt to heal insecure attachments from childhood. Negative patterns established by their parents (object) are projected onto their partners. | Detriangulation, Co-Therapy, Psychoanalysis, Holding Environment |
| Psychoanalytic Family Therapy | Nathan Ackerman | By applying the strategies of Freudian psychoanalysis to the family system therapists can gain insight into the interlocking psychopathologies of the family members and seek to improve complementarity | Psychoanalysis, Authenticity, Joining, Confrontation |
| Solution Focused Therapy | Kim Insoo Berg, Steve de Shazer, William O'Hanlon, Michelle Weiner-Davis, Paul Watzlawick | The inevitable onset of constant change leads to negative interpretations of the past and language that shapes the meaning of an individual’s situation, diminishing their hope and causing them to overlook their own strengths and resources. | Future Focus, Beginner’s Mind, Miracle Question, Goal Setting, Scaling |
| Strategic Therapy | Jay Haley, Cloe Madanes | Symptoms of dysfunction are purposeful in maintaining homeostasis in the family hierarchy as it transitions through various stages in the family life cycle. | Directives, Paradoxical Injunctions, Positioning, Metaphoric Tasks, Restraining (Going Slow) |
| Structural family therapy | Salvador Minuchin, Harry Aponte, Charles Fishman, Braulio Montalvo | Family problems arise from maladaptive boundaries and subsystems that are created within the overall family system of rules and rituals that governs their interactions. | Joining, Family Mapping, Hypothesizing, Reenactments, Reframing, Unbalancing |
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