Essay on Couples and family therapy relationships

Multiple Relationships

The task is: “Couples and family therapy relationships create unique ethical questions and considerations for the therapist. Each party in the counseling relationship must be recognized and protected. Yet, oftentimes, such challenges confront the human services professional from unexpected perspectives. What unique challenges do you expect to find working in a couples and family therapy environment? How might an effective therapist manage such a multiplicity of roles within a single family system? Discuss your understanding of the personal, academic, and experiential preparation and experience necessary to effectively work as a couples and family therapist.”

The most substantial challenge for any therapist in couples and family therapy is to maintain therapeutic neutrality. The therapist shouldn’t impose personal views and include his/her ideas about the family life into the therapy session.

As it is stated in Chapter 11, an effective therapeutic alliance depends on the personal characteristics of the therapist. This professional should be fully prepared for a very complicated area of therapy which includes multiplicity of roles for the couples and family therapist. The therapist should use both research materials for the preparation to the sessions and also gather some personal surveillance in his/her private life.

Among the other challenges may I can also name dealing with troubled couples’ relationships.

Another complicated aspect of the family therapy is the issue of out-of-control kids and teenagers. The therapeutic approach to them has to be systematic and well-planned.

There is also a common issue for the majority of people – depression. Couples therapy is not an effective means of treating depression in individuals whose marital relationship is not troubled. Similarly, treating depression with individual treatment does not resolve marital difficulty.

Several of the couples and family treatments that have proved effective have a highly integrative character, bringing together concepts and interventions that cross schools of treatment and bridge family, couple and individual sessions, and sometimes even actively involve larger systems, such as juvenile justice.

This new emphasis on integrative treatment is one of the unmistakable signs that the field of family therapy is moving away from the simplistic ideas that all effective therapy must involve sessions with the whole family toward an approach that includes multiple organizing concepts, methods of intervention, and kinds of sessions. Involvement of the family is an essential ingredient in the treatment of many problems, but not the only one. What is emerging is the value of couples and family therapy, as one salient aspect of effective integrative treatment.

Also the family therapy may be an effective part of the general treatments of alcoholics, adolescent substance abusers, delinquents and schizophrenics.

Values in Couples and Family Therapy

The task is: “The human services practitioner’s personal value system may often become of greater importance and concern when counseling couples and families. Human services practitioners must remain committed to not imposing their own personal values upon their clients. Following your review of “The Case of Frank and Judy” on p. 459 of your textbook, select which of the three human services practitioner responses you find most appropriate. Support your choice and explain why you feel that this human services practitioner orientation might be expected to yield the most positive outcomes in working with this couple. How would you further personalize your response as a human services practitioner if working with Frank and Judy in order to hopefully achieve even better outcomes?”

In my opinion, the approach of the counselor A is the most appropriate among the others.

First of all, this counselor doesn’t bring her issues to her sessions with the mentioned couple. She focuses on the individual traits and their relations as couple. Of course I think that it may be right to try to help them to solve their problems, because they really seek the counselor’s advice, and she doesn’t concentrate on conflict solving.

But in general her approach is relatively correct in comparison to other counselors.

What I like about counselor B approach is that she discusses problems with this couple. There are many evidences about the positive impact of problem-oriented integrative approach on certain problems. But her major mistake is a leading this couple towards divorce. She’s imposing her values to the patients, this kind of approach is inappropriate in family therapy.

Therefore, I would suggest Frank and Judy to use the approach of counselor A and also would include the reviewing and discussing of their conflict situations but without imposing my personal point of view on this marriage.