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Structural Approach to Family Counseling

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Structural Approach to Family Counseling
Beverly Manning
COUN 601 – Marriage and Family Counseling I
Liberty University
July 5, 2013

ABST RACT Families are always growing and changing. They are considered living systems made up of many components. If families can’t adjust to change, the capability of the family and its individual members can be compromised. Structural family therapy (SFT) is a therapeutic approach that identifies that families have a lot of strengths. SFT tries to push families past dysfunctional patterns of interaction. This report details the application of the structural family therapy model, and I will specify my own therapeutic technique and explain how I would include faith into my counseling sessions.

Structural Approach to Family Counseling One of the most important goals of a therapist is to understand how a family works. The family therapy movement has had the daunting task of trying to uncover the many facets of the family. Family therapy is full of many different approaches from psychoanalysis to the narrative approach. Each approach has been able to uncover a new aspect of the family. According to Nicholas (1999), the structural family therapy has had a significant impact on family therapy by introducing concepts of family hierarchy and boundaries. This allowed for the introduction to the idea of family as a new and organized strategy to cope with the family dynamic (Nichols, 1999). In this paper, I will explore the historical facts of the structural approach, as well, as detail the techniques and components of this approach. Also, I will explain my own therapeutic technique, and how I will integrate scripture and faith into my counseling sessions. Structural family therapy (SFT) is a model of treatment based on systems

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