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CHAPTER 1 Adopting a Family Relationship Framework Family…
CHAPTER 1
Adopting a Family Relationship Framework
Family Systems: Fundamental Concepts
1. Entrance into a family occurs by birth, adoption, or through marriage or other committed relationships. Compare the characteristics of family membership (loyalty, support from others, closeness) of two people in your family, each of whom joined the family by different routes. How are they different and how are they alike?
2. All families indoctrinate new members (children, in-laws) into their systems. Sometimes these efforts to forge group cohesion can be felt as pressures against individual wants and needs. Identify three ways your family typically tries to indoctrinate its children into the system (consider your own experience as a child). How have you experienced these influences? Have you ever tried to rebel? How do you join others in trying to similarly influence new members? How do you interact with new members differently?
3. In what type of family structure did you grow up – intact, one led by a single parent, stepfamily? Has divorce of a family member or members played a role in your life? If so, describe the impact of divorce on your experience. How have you been affected by family members whom you think should divorce but haven’t?
4. What are the expectations you have about the family structure you will be part of in five years? Twenty years? Forty years? Try to frame your answer around a discussion of your attitudes toward marriage, children, divorce, and extended families.
5. Can you think of any special internal stresses that depleted the family’s resources as you were growing up? Consider financial downturn, migration, chronic health problems, or the death of a family member. How did the family cope? What community support, if any, was available?
Family Structures, Narratives, Roles, and Patterns
6. Shared family rituals help insure family identity and continuity. List some of the rituals you recall in growing up. Comment on the place and influence of those experiences in your later life.
7. Families typically develop rules that outline and allocate the roles and functions of its members. Those who live together for any length of time develop repeatable, preferred patterns for negotiating and arranging their lives to maximize harmony and predictability. Identify and describe the roles that you played as you grew up. Which stayed the same over time and which have changed?
8. Most families have an outlook that perceives the world in general as a positive and predictable place or as a dangerous and menacing one. This perspective affects all family members. The stories that the family tells about its outlook are part of its narrative. Describe the narrative of your family’s worldview. Did it change over time? How were you affected?
9. Draw a picture of your family. Be sure to include all members. When you have finished, note what you see about your view of relationships, alliances, and coalitions in the family.
10. List in order of importance the roles that you currently play (son or daughter, friend, student, lover, neighbor, etc.).
1. ________________________ 4. ________________________ 2. ________________________ 5. ________________________ 3. ________________________ 6. ________________________
Which of these roles are integral to your sense of self (ones you believe you cannot do without)?
Of all the roles listed above, which one would you insist on holding on to most strongly?
Of all the roles you have listed as currently playing, which would you find it easiest to give up?
Resiliency
11. All families face challenges: an unexpected death, the divorce, job loss, retirement. What resiliency factors were available in a challenging situation in your family? How did the family reorganize itself, solve problems, and cope with threat?
12. Family resiliency can be a function of intact support systems: networks of friends, extended family, religious groups, community resources. Can you identify the support systems that helped your family in a crisis?
13. Identify an experience that severely tested your family’s resiliency. Were you able to recover? If so, what resources, from both within and outside the family, were you able to call on to help? If not, what do you think might have helped your family to cope more effectively with the experience?
14. What role did spirituality play in your family life when you were growing up? Did you receive guidance or comfort from a religious community or other groups with strong religious components in their teachings? Comment on their impact on your current views about religion and spirituality.
Gender and Cultural Considerations
15. Family systems are embedded in a community and in society at large. Which of the following 7 social or cultural factors do you believe were especially significant in your family of origin? Choose one or more and elaborate.
Race Sexual
Orientation
Ethnicity
Religious Orientation
Social Class
Immigration Status
16. Cross-cultural and cross-racial adoptions are more common today than in years past. How would these phenomena have been viewed by the members of your family twenty years ago? How are they viewed by them today? Compare past and present views and describe the changes to the family system that might explain any differences.
17. Describe an incident where you or a member of your family became aware of class differences in an exchange with another family. By examining your own reactions to the incident, describe your own views on class differences.
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18. What were the messages about work and gender roles you received growing up? Did your mother work outside the home? How were home chores divided? What was your father’s role in childcare? If you have siblings of a different gender, were you treated differently because of the different gender status? If so, how?
19. How would you describe your own ethnic background? Describe some influences on your values, attitudes, and present behavior that can be attributed to that background.
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Cybernetics
20. Provide an explanation of some behavior of yours that has been criticized by a significant family member – first in the language of linear causality and then in that of circular causality.
21. Consider a problem that exists or has existed in your family (say, an adult’s drinking problem, or chronic unemployment of a parent, or a child who is a slow learner or one who refuses to go to school.) Describe the problem as it is understood by your family.
Now rethink the problem as a possible product of a flawed relationship between two or three members. Do you play a role in this problem? Describe the various flawed relationships.
The Identified Patient
22. At different stages of a family’s life cycle, different members may be labeled the “identified patient” or the symptomatic person. Did this occur in your family? Who was so designated? Did you ever receive that designation? How did it affect your everyday behavior and your picture of yourself? How do you imagine this designation affected a different family member?
23. Is there currently an identified patient in your family, perhaps labeled “sick” or “bad”? Does this person drain off tension for the family, or distract from other underlying problems? If so, identify the underlying problems. How have you reacted?
How did this designation get established? How could it be changed?
What would happen to the interaction of the remaining family members if this person left?
CHAPTER 3
Gender, Culture, and Ethnicity Factors in Family Functioning
Gender Issues
53. Which of your parents played a more nurturing role in raising their children? Did this activity have high or low status in the family?
54. You often hear the phrase “It’s a guy’s thing.” Discuss a recent incident you have experienced where gender might have provided an explanation for the behavior.
55. How do you experience women who are assertive and driven and men who are passive and emotionally vulnerable? Take an honest assessment of your views. How might your thoughts and feelings influence your work as a therapist?
56. Did you grow up with same-sex or opposite-sex siblings or both? Where were you in the birth order? How did these experiences affect your attitudes regarding gender issues?
Gender, Values, and Power
57. How was power distributed in your family? Who was in charge of what? What role did gender play in forming these assignments? What happened within the family if one member tried to step outside of their assigned gender role?
58. Did you experience directly or hear about domestic violence growing up? How did you react? What impact has the experience had on your current primary relationships? Whether from direct experience or from general awareness, does knowing the gender of the perpetrator and victim influence you in terms of your gender views? How? How might your views on gender and violence affect your work with female clients? Male clients?
59. List in two columns the values that had the highest and lowest valences in your family of origin. Include the following (and any others you wish to add) in your list.
Autonomy Relationships
Nurturance Dependency
Control Caretaking
Independence
HIGH VALENCE LOW VALENCE
___________________ ___________________
___________________ ___________________
___________________ ___________________
___________________ ___________________
___________________ ___________________
60. Did your family approve of your behaviors in terms of gender? How did their approval or disapproval affect you?
61. Name and describe some ways in which a gender-based rule or sexist attitude or stereotypic sex role assignment affected the kind of adult you became.
Gender, Work, and Family Life
62. Did your mother work outside the home? How did that affect the distribution of power in the family?
63. Did your father ever lose a job or suffer significant economic loss? If so, how did it affect him? Did it affect the distribution of power in the family? If so, how?
Gender Role Training
64. What kinds of toys were you given as a child (e.g., dolls, trucks)? Did you play with them under a gender schema of what was considered masculine or feminine? To what extent did such play enhance or inhibit your development from a gender perspective? What kinds of toys will you give your children? Why?
65. What strengths, if any, have you acquired by bypassing traditional gender roles? Any special enjoyments from breaking the rules? Any significant mishaps?
66. To what extent do the following qualities stereotypically attributed to men characterize the men in your family? What were the consequences to your developmental experience?
(a) an antifeminine element, in which young boys learn to avoid in their own behavior anything considered feminine
(b) a success element that values competition and winning
(c) an aggressive element, physically fighting when necessary to defend oneself
(d) a sexual element, the belief that men should be preoccupied with sex
(e) a self-reliant element, calling for men to be independent and self sufficient and not to seek help from others.
Multicultural and Culture-Specific Considerations
67. Are there specific groups around whom you feel uncomfortable (gays, welfare recipients, transsexuals, child molesters, wife batterers, religious groups)? As best you can, trace the origins of those feelings.
68. Draw a cultural genogram extending over at least three generations, charting your family’s social, racial, religious, and migration history.
69. Did you grow up with people culturally and ethnically like yourself? If so, how did that contribute to your stability and sense of belonging? If you grew up in an environment where you felt different, how did that affect your sense of yourself and your acceptance by others?
70. Which social class best describes the one in which you grew up? (Select one)
Working class Lower middle class Middle class Upper middle class Upper class
How does this background affect your attitudes regarding class differences? Are there areas in your thinking that might affect your ability to work therapeutically with members of classes different from your own?
71. When and under what circumstances did your family immigrate to this country? How did this event affect your current attitudes regarding immigration of others?
72. Family therapists must try to distinguish between a client family’s patterns that are universal (common to a wide variety of families), culture specific (common to a group, such as African Americans or Cuban Americans or perhaps lesbian families), or idiosyncratic (unique to this particular family) in their assessment of family functioning. Identify patterns in your family that seem universal, culture-specific and idiosyncratic. Identify any conflicts among these patterns and describe how they affected you.
73. Describe how it might feel if you, as a member of the racial or ethnic majority culture in your area, work as a therapist mostly with minority populations. Or, how do you think that you, as a member of a minority working mostly with people from the majority culture, will feel. Identify potential obstacles and opportunities that you imagine will be unique to you.
74. Describe your family’s economic status. How has that status affected you view yourself and other people?
