Structural Family Therapy In The Bridge Family

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The Bridge family consist of husband Chris, age 54, wife Marguerite, age 49 and daughters Erica, age 16, and Christina, age 14. Chris and Marguerite have been married for 18 years. Chris became a long haul truck driver five years ago after losing his job of 16 years as a technician for AT&T. The family went through a difficult adjustment period when Chris lost his job at AT&T. Chris experienced a lot of embarrassment when he lost his job. Although, Chris was not happy at the job, losing the job was difficult for the household. The job loss created fiction with the marriage and the friction was witnessed by the children. It became so bad at times that the children thought their parents were going to divorce. Chris decided to change …show more content…

The objective of structural family therapy for this family would be to improve the functionality of the family system and restore the structured family system with development (Collins, Jordan, & Coleman, 2010). Additionally, since the family dynamics are somewhat different since the father is away often and the girls were younger when the family dysfunction initiated, it may be appropriate to work on boundaries in therapy. McAdams, et al.(2016) found that “foundational structural principles of family hierarchy, system and subsystem boundaries, and member alliances all continue to play a central role in current applications of the structural model, and the assessment criteria applied most recently to structural family therapy process and outcome research are likewise grounded in those structural principles” (McAdams, et al., …show more content…

In essence, the therapist is to mimic the family. The therapist will mimic the family’s mood, behavior, posture, tone and other factors that can be mimicked in a session. Mimicking helps to build rapport and helps bring comfort to the family. For this family, mimicking maybe more effective for rapport building with Erica and Christina. Unbalancing in therapy helps to bring some steadiness in the family therapy session. Unbalancing is a practice to be used on needed occasions. When unbalancing, the therapist have to briefly take sides in the

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