Strengths Oriented Assessment And Practice For Change : Family Client System Paper

The Sanchez family wants the local social service agency to provide a psychosocial assessment. As a social worker at the agency, they will apply sociocultural and social change lenses. To demonstrate an understanding how each of the theoretical or perspective lenses can apply to the Sanchez family case. To identify their problems, determine their skills and capacities, what they are doing well, how they accomplish it and then analyze ways that those strengths might apply to the identified problems.

In this paper I will be describing how the first two session of the Brice family went. I will talk about what systems approach to therapy was used, and will include how Whitaker and Napier conceptualized the family’s difficulties. I will also describe how this differs from an individual understanding, and will talk about what specific interventions they used to support their systemic understanding of this family.

This article will discuss the intervention use with the Lopez Family at the macro level. The therapist needs to understand the family’s values, beliefs, and culture to be able to identify the type of intervention that will best work for the family. This article will discuss Conflict Theory and how it relates to the Lopez Family. It will also discuss the access to social services, client wellbeing, and the issues of human rights regarding the Lopez Family. Mr. Lopez, Mrs. Lopez, Tomas, Gabriela, and David are the members of the Lopez Family.

The family is made up of five people: Claudia, the IP; Carolyn, mother; Laura, the sister; Don, the brother; and David, the father. The family is coming into therapy because there have been mounting concerns about Claudia and her behavior—acting out, staying out late, some fairly typical teenage stuff. For the purpose of this paper, I will be starting at the beginning where the family is first coming into therapy. I will first school that I will apply is Structural Family Therapy and the second school is Bowen Family Therapy.

Salvador Minuchin, born and raised in Argentina, is known as the founder of structural family therapy (Colapinto, 1982). Before creating what would be known as his most lasting contribution, Minuchin spent years paving his way to his success. Traveling back and forth from Israel to the United States, Minuchin finally settled down in the year 1954 where he began training in psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute in the United States (Nichols, 2014). Following the White Institute, Minuchin began working at the Wiltwyck School, which consisted of delinquent boys from unsystematic, multi-problem, underprivileged families (Colapinto, 1982). At the time Minuchin began working there, therapists had found that certain clinical populations were not responding to traditional psychotherapy (Lappin, 1988). In fact, the population of delinquent children, like those that Minuchin was working with at Wiltwyck, resisted even more so than other populations to this traditional psychotherapy (Lappin, 1988). This was due to the fact that the traditional psychotherapeutic techniques used, were developed for middle-class patients who were verbally articulate (Colapinto, 1982). It was then when Minuchin realized that a new model of change was needed, particularly one that worked with unprivileged, delinquent boys (Lappin, 1988).

All done within a serene setting, that is designed to be free of distractions, and whereas the therapist I will inspire all members to participate in the therapy, using the systemic processes will help to facilitate this goal. Using the Strategic Family therapy, I will use the two maps of human behavior, which is used to guide me during the healing session. The first is PUSH is the ellipsis, which will authorize my point of view as the therapist (M.U.S.E, 2010). .

Haley and Madanes’ approach to strategic family therapy argues that change occurs through the process of the family carrying out assignments issued by the therapist. As described in Madanes’ Strategic Family Therapy (1981), “strategic therapists attempt to design a therapeutic strategy for each specific problem.” Therapists issue directives that are designed to shift the framework of the family to resolve the displaying problem. Treatment of these issues would include intense involvement, carefully planned interventions designed to reach clear goals, frequent use of therapist-generated directives or assignments, and paradoxical procedures.

For this assignment, two different theoretical approaches will be discussed, Bowenian family therapy and structural family therapy, and they will be used individually to construct a treatment plan to help clients reach their goals. Within each treatment plan discussed, short-term and long-term goals of therapy will be established and the family’s presenting problems will be defined. Two techniques that will be assigned to help them reach their therapeutic goals and any expected outcome from using those techniques will be discussed.

Family therapy is a technique that has many alternative approaches to every aspect of treatment which Nichols (2014), states may present a challenge when describing a basic technique. The two models of family therapy in which I feel that I would be most effective and comfortable with would be, experiential family therapy and solution-focused brief therapy. I feel most comfortable with these models because, I adapt to the role of the therapist of both therapies naturally. According to Nichols (2014), when families seek therapy they are stuck in a life-cycle transition, sometimes they are obvious and sometimes they are not obvious. I’ve found that during the first session an excellent question is to ask the client why now so that they can

In conceptualising the development of the family system, Bowenian therapists are past-focused. They believe that emotional fusion that is passed down from one generation to the next is the cause of psychological problems (Nichols, 2010, pp 119-122). Normal family development according to Solution Focused therapist produces families with flexible structures, clear boundaries and well-organised hierarchies. This is quite similar to Bowenian’s concept of normal family development. Differentiated individuals after all need to have clear boundaries. Similarly, flexible structures and well-organised hierarchies do promote low anxiety and therefore generate positive emotional contact between family members. The difference is that instead of being past-focused, Solution Focused therapy assiduously avoids the past and focuses their clients as much as possible on the present and future. (Nichols, 2010, pp 321).

The author’s family is very similar to other two parent, child rearing families other than the decrease in socialization from living in a very rural community where there are no other children to socialize with. The family assimilates into the community well as the author is involved with teaching classes to the local first responders and the family is very close to the few neighbors that they have. The family manages daily living one day at a time by working as a team and dividing the household tasks between the author and her husband, for example if the author cooks the husband does the dishes and vice versa, this generally works out well however there is usually friendly arguments about who gets to cook. The roles have had to get a bit more flexible with the author now attending school and household tasks have moved down the priority list a notch. Marriage, parents, and lover relationships are all viewed as a team effort with lots of give and take and a strong emphasis on compromise. For birth control the author’s husband has a vasectomy. The family copes with stressful life events by communicating; one strength that the family utilizes well is incorporating

The MAPP Task Force members are a strong force in the MAPP process and serve as excellent resource in the formation of the Pierce County Community Health Assessment, however additional members are needed to round out the team. The MAPP Task Force is forming a subcommittee of members who will make up the Community Teams and Strengths Assessment team (CTSA). The purpose of CTSA is to gather information from the community that will help answer important questions such as “"How is quality of life perceived in our community?" and "What assets do we have that can be used to improve community health?" (NACCHO.org, 2013). Working together, the CTSA team will dive deep into the community to understand what the residents feel is the most important issues in their county.

My first assumption of family therapy was to involve the parents and the individual that had the problem. This book explored further what it

A few of the techniques explains to the client which technique words and what doesn’t in a family setting. In the beginning, it’s more about bringing out concerns more than something that may or may not be taking place in the household. Solution-Focused Therapy also focuses on goals and helpful strategies. The true purpose for this type of therapy is focusing on family strengths. One example of the solution-focused therapy is the formula first session task. This task is an example of showing the family what helps. Also, the counselor is constantly asking questions and doing observations to see how well things go when the family leaves therapy. Another example is the exception question. This is usually the counselor looking at the family and

Solution-focused therapy is different from narrative and collaborative therapy because it focuses more on discovering solutions to problems by asking miracle and scaling questions (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2013). Solution-focused therapists utilize miracle and scaling questions to help clients change their thoughts and behavior. Miracle questions challenge clients to think about what their lives could be like if all their problems suddenly went away and were solved (Henderson & Thompson, 2016). Scaling questions challenge the client to magnify their view of the current circumstance (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2013). Solution-focused therapy is also different from narrative and collaborative therapy because the counselor leads the counseling session. Counselors lay out clear expectations for their clients to change, and expect them to actively participate in counseling so change occurs. The third difference between the three approaches is that solution-focused therapy is complaint-based, while narrative and collaborative therapy is not (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2013). Clients come to counseling with a complaint, and counselors typically work with those who ready and willing to change. Another difference is that solution-focused therapy consists of five steps, which are “co-constructing a problem and goal, identifying and amplifying exceptions, assigning tasks, evaluating effectiveness, and reevaluating problems and goals” (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2013, p. 382). Collaborative and narrative therapy do not follow these five