Framework to assess family's interaction:
(1) Family structure: preferred transactional patterns and the alternatives available.
(2) System's flexibility and its capacity for elaboration and restructuring, as revealed by the reshuffling of system's alliances, coalitions, and subsystems in response to changing circumstances.
(3) Family system's resonance, its sensitivity to the individual members' actions: range of enmeshment and disengagement.
(4) Family life context: sources of stress and support.
(5) Family's developmental stages and its performance of task appropriate to the stage.
(6) Patient's identified symptoms is used to maintain family's preferred transactional patterns.
Joining and Restructuring Operations/Interventions.
- Restructuring confronts and challenges a family in an attempt to force a therapeutic change.
- Joining operations do not challenge; they decrease the distance between family and therapist, helping the therapists to blend with the family as they they participate in the events of the therapeutic session.
- Sometimes a joining operation can be a restructuring operation too. It does so without confronting family members.
Metaphor: In joining operations, the therapist becomes an actor in the family play. In restructuring, he functions like the director as well as an actor. He creates scenarios, choreographs, highlight themes, and leads family members to improvise within the constraints of the family drama. But he also uses himself, entering into alliances and coalitions, creating, strengthening, or weakening boundaries, and opposing or supporting transactional patterns. He uses his position of leadership within the therapeutic system to pose challenges to which the family has to accomodate.
When the therapist joins the family, he has two main tasks. He must accomodate to the family, but he must maintain himself in a position of leadership within the therapeutic unit. He must resist being sucked into the family system.
Joining Operations: (1) Maintenance, (2) Tracking, (3) Mimesis,
Restructing Operations: (1) Actualising family transactional patterns(enacting transactional patterns, recreating communication channels, manipulating space) (2) Marking boundaries (individual and sub-system), (3) Escalating stress (blocking transactional patterns, developing implicit conflict, joining alliance/coalition), (4) assigning tasks (homework), (5) utilising symptoms (exaggerating, de-emphasizing, moving to a new symptom, relabelling, changing the symptom's affect, (6) manipulating mood (intensity, direction, manipulate distance, exaggerated imitation), (7) supporting, educating and guiding.