Family Therapy With Cultural Groups Essay

Introduction

Family therapy is very essential because it enables individuals, the family, and the cultural groups to change and relieve their stress. The approaches to family therapy are grounded on a set of values and theoretical assumptions. Many therapy procedures can be borrowed from various models, depending on what is likely to work best with a given family. An integrative approach to the practice of family therapy must include guiding principles that help the therapists organize goals, observations, and ways to promote change. The central consideration is what is in the best interests of the family and choosing a therapy for the family and particular cultural groups will depend on what is likely to work best with them.

Strengths

Family therapy has several strengths as outlined:

1. Family therapy focuses on all the approaches that pay attention to both verbal and nonverbal communication. Strategic therapy as practiced by Haley and Madness assumes that the central aim of communication is to attain power in interpersonal relationships. Symptoms are seen as ways of communicating to control other family members. In conducting the family sessions, the therapist attends to both the verbal and nonverbal process of making requests.
2. In working with a multi-cultural framework using a family therapy, many ethnic and cultural groups place a great value on the extended family. If therapists are working with an individual from a cultural background that gives special value to including the grandparents, aunts, and uncles in the treatment, it is easy to see the family approaches have a distinct advantage over the individual therapy.
3. In family therapy, anthropologists approach each family as a unique culture whose particular characteristics must be understood. Families have a unique language that governs behavior, communication, and even how to feel about and experience life. They have celebrations and rituals that mark transitions, protect them against outside interference, and connect them to their past as well as projected future.
4. The larger experience of culture and ethnicity permeates relationships in families stretching back to generations, often to the other lands and other periods and history.
5. The family therapies are concerned with here-and-how interactions in the family. The role of history is handled in different ways.
6. Family therapy has in common a commitment to helping family members learn new and more effective ways of interacting. They tend to reduce defensiveness and facilitate an open and honest expression of feelings and thoughts.

Limitations

Family therapy has the following limitations:

1. Some therapists approach family systems to work with little concern for the individuals as long as the whole of the family function better.
2. Some approaches assume that family history is crucial in understanding the present functioning, whereas other models treat information phenomenologically or make no assumption about history at all.
3. The family therapists are less concerned with gathering family history. They focus on what maintains the current problem and how to solve it in the present. Strategic therapy deals mainly with here-and-now power struggles and control issues in a family but it does not attempt to educate clients about the origin or development of these problems.
4. Most of the family therapies tend to be brief because families who seek professional help typically want the resolution of some problematic symptom. In addition, they are short-term, solution-focused and action oriented, family therapy tends to deal with present interactions.