Interactional Family Therapy: A Faith-based Perspective (eBook)

CHAPTER 1:
Beyond Counseling and Therapy

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts. -Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Family therapy as a practice specialty for practitioners is a recent development, having come into its own in recent years. The term family is not a singular unit that can be defined. It can only be operationalized to describe the interactions within a system encompassing formal consideration for homeostasis and a grounding for legal definitions by various agencies. Family, then, is defined legally as a group of persons who are connected by blood or by affinity or through law within two or three generations, consisting of parents and their children living together in a domestic relationship with a shared commitment to one another (USLegal).

Child behavior and most adult problems do not occur in isolation. Most child, adolescent and adult problems should be treated as family problems. The family functions as a whole and must, therefore, be viewed as a whole entity and treated for effective change to occur. Interactional therapy occurs when two or more individuals, such as a practitioner and a participant (individuals and/or family members), have the ability to have an effect, influence, or impact upon one another through the counseling or therapeutic process.

Interactional faith-based therapy, then, must have a reference point to give theory and techniques substance. Different faith groups offer different aspects of application, understanding, and significance to their particular faith-based theological models. The emphasis of this book is on how to remove the presenting problems that families by faith can face by altering their perspective of the problem and their patterns of interactions. The authors believe God is the Author of change, therefore, it is possible to enable families by faith to see a loving God who has accepted them totally in accordance with unfathomable grace.

Grounding faith-based interactional family therapy for practice

Basic dysfunctionality is a consequence of the essential nature of humanity and is perpetuated primarily during socialization—except in the case of neurological problems (i.e., chemical and/or organic disease, congenital defects, etc.). An individual’s aberrant behavior at any given time generally reflects the composite state of socialization within the family system, as well as the family system itself.

Frequently, person-oriented practitioners who apply individual therapy techniques to multiple family members erroneously refer to their approach as family therapy, which is both confusing and ineffective. To be an effective faith-based family practitioner, it is important to learn how to appropriately address the whole family as a single system for change, carefully considering the physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of being in how the family system functions.

How does a practitioner engage in interactional faith-based family therapy?

The theory, practice, and tools provided in this book are based on the following premises:

1. The presenting problem reflects the qualitative state of the immediate family system in which the identified or stated dysfunctional behavior is manifested.
2. If possible, the presenting problem must be removed to validate the process of change.
3. In all cases, the practitioner is responsible for facilitating the alterations of the affective behavioral and cognitive patterns of the family system to allow aberrant or dysfunctional behaviors to become unnecessary.
4. The participant (i.e., the client family) is responsible for the positive elements of change, thereby receiving the credit for the change.
5. God is ultimately responsible for all lasting change (Galatians 2.20), and to Him, not the practitioner, goes the glory.
6. Faith-based refers to those persons, ideas, theologies, or therapeutic approaches that embrace loyalties, reverence, trust, confidence and beliefs, specifically expressed through faith and God.
7. Finally, the faith-based practitioner introduces the reality of maturity and moves the family beyond current dysfunctional behaviors to that of healthy, mature decision making. This extends to the roles of responsibility and accountability as father, mother, husband, wife, and child within the context of the family system.

What is different in interactional family therapy?

The techniques practiced today in most psychodynamic approaches tend to end family dysfunction within the uniqueness of the individual. These approaches seem to meander through sessions with no particular direction or fixed destination for the treatment, expectations, or intended outcomes. However, in Interactive Family Therapy, explicit techniques are set and measurable attempts to validate therapy with specific definable expectations for intended outcomes.

The outcomes of a theory, per se, are ultimately inconclusive. However, theories do generate questions to help the practitioner seek out situational and procedural information. This book builds on the following structure:

• Therapy identifies the needs, expectations, goals, and techniques for healing
• Faith expresses the perspective for the practitioner
• Theory (i.e., the Interactional Family Therapy model) generates the questions and sets the direction and parameters of the process
• Techniques gather the information and address the objectives

Theories are tools for process. The interactional faith-based family therapist engenders questions specifically aimed to resolve a dysfunction within the members of a family and/or the family system.

What is the difference between counseling and therapy?

Most therapists counsel while they are doing therapy. However, not everyone who counsels is providing therapy—often they are simply giving advice or suggesting ways to improve a situation. Some of the differences between doing therapy and counseling include the following.

Counseling tends toward:

• Advice-giving
• Encouraging
• Evaluating circumstances and situations
• Exchanging information
• Suggesting/recommending alternative actions or behaviors

Therapy tends toward:

• Using creative interventions to help participants re-structure relationships
• Reframing psychological and/or spiritual problems to assist the individual or family in resolving those problems to experience healing
• Systematizing the relationships within a family objectively to allow for healing to occur epistemologically (epistemology, the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief and faith)
• Facilitating interactions within relationships, which is different from the more basic information gathering or advice-giving that occurs in counseling

Although in nearly all professional counseling and/or therapy sessions, social and therapeutic boundaries in counseling frequently blur or merge, the counselor or therapist defines those boundaries. In Interactional Faith-based Family Therapy, the therapist (practitioner) and the client’s family (participants) negotiate the boundaries and define them conjointly within the context of a professional relationship and a faith perspective.

Meanwhile, the counseling community of practitioners (some in that community embracing attitudes, activities, and other practices in counseling and therapy but without a religious or spiritual basis) has struggled to comprehend the unique spiritual perspectives of its clients. Failure to recognize the differences between faith-based counseling and faith-based therapy has been both the cause and the result of ongoing conflicts among scholars and practitioners in both theology and psychology. It is in therapy that the gap closes between psychology and theology in understanding the faith-based approach. The primary problems in faith-based counseling appear to be embedded in the following limitations:

1. An inability to view counseling and therapy separately from one another and an unwillingness to collaborate;
2. An indiscriminate contempt for faith-based counseling and therapy with subsequent attempts to discredit it by many secular psychologists, therapists, and counselors;
3. A similar indiscriminate contempt for psychology with subsequent attempts to discredit it by many faith-based counseling and therapy practitioners;
4. An insistence on the integration of theology and psychology along with a failure to see that such an attempt at unification is a classic paradox when it comes to epistemology and the nature of man’s beginning; and,
5. An inability to recognize safety issues and boundaries when...