The Craft of Family Therapy

Challenging Certainties

Salvador Minuchin, Michael D. Reiter, Charmaine Borda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000373196
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

This cutting-edge second edition of The Craft of Family Therapy revisits some of Salvador Minuchin's most famous cases, guiding trainee therapists through basic techniques and ideas while illuminating the unique voice of Minuchin as the founder of Structural Family Therapy.

The book begins by teaching readers the fundamentals of family therapy through the lens of rich commentary from Salvador Minuchin on some of his most interesting cases. It then moves on to three detailed supervision transcripts from Minuchin's former students, illustrating the struggles, fears, and insecurities that new family therapists face and how they can overcome them. In a new, ground-breaking third section, Reiter and Borda share their own lessons from Minuchin as well as expand his influential ideas, emphasizing a strength-based family therapy approach.

Written in an accessible, practical style, The Craft of Family Therapy, 2nd edition draws on a wealth of fascinating case examples to bring Minuchin's theory and experience to today's family therapists and psychotherapists in practice and training.

Part I

Concepts and Practice of the Craft

Part I of this book provides you with several Master Family Therapy classes that cover the four main concepts of family therapy that Minuchin highlighted during the Friday Supervision trainings with the Master’s and doctoral family therapy students. These concepts include deconstructing the symptom, unwrapping family member identities, expanding subsystems, and a focus on the self of the therapist. The first chapter presents you with some of the tools that family therapists should have in their pouch so that they can engage in the craft of family therapy. Each of the next four chapters focuses on one of the highlighted concepts, providing you with a zoomed-in focus on developing that skill. The last chapter in Part I provides you with an opportunity to integrate and apply all of the concepts presented.

1 The Craft of Family Therapy

When a family comes into your office, what do you do? What is the correct way to start the session? Do you ask about the problem? Do you offer your services as a healer? Do you smile and ask about the trip to the office? Are you silent until one family member begins to talk? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. The problem with therapy is that it is an encounter between strangers preparing themselves for a significant journey together. Therefore, the early joining in the process will be idiosyncratic, depending on the particular family and the particular therapist. It’s a journey that starts in uncertainty.

Most new therapists will probably fall back on theory as a way to reduce their anxiety so that they can function. But which theory do you choose to operate from? How do you choose a theory that will enable you to be effective? In fact, there is no clear answer, and the question is perhaps too simple. Whatever model you choose to work from, even if it is from an integrative position, there is more to therapy than simply the concepts and techniques of that approach. Two therapists may use the same technique, even with the same family, and for one therapist that technique seems to help the family, while the other therapist finds that it flops.

Many young therapists would find this puzzling. That’s because they look at therapy as a course of action in which the therapist observes a family and implements techniques to help them with their problems. They do not understand the complexity of the process. The craft of therapy includes not only an understanding of the characteristics of the family and a grasp of techniques that can facilitate change, but also an awareness of how they, the therapists, are functioning within the therapeutic system. Further, it is understanding how the therapeutic system fits within larger systems and systems of systems.

We will be exploring the craft of therapy throughout this book, but we begin by offering an imaginary “therapist pouch” to prepare the reader for the journey. It is somewhat similar to a journeyman’s bag in which the worker carries the tools that will be needed for the most frequent jobs.

To fill the family therapist’s pouch, we have included items that help in the task of rearranging relationships. They are grouped under the following headings: Basic Principles; Techniques; Working with Subsystems; and The Self of the Therapist. Each group of tools is presented separately in the following section, but they are also intertwined, available as both separate and combined resources.

The pouch offers a useful framework for the beginning of this journey. It also serves as a resource during the therapeutic process. When a therapist adopts a distant position from the family, temporarily shielded from the demand for action, they can observe and think, drawing on the pouch to plan the most appropriate and effective route for intervention.

The Family Therapist Pouch

Basic Principles

Joining is the Essential Element

This is the first item in the pouch. Joining is not a skill or a technique. It’s a mindset constructed out of respect, empathy, curiosity, and a commitment to healing. It signals the establishment of a work-oriented system. Joining happens from the first contact with the family to the final goodbye at termination. Through this connection, the therapist is able to engage the family, to support as well as to challenge.

All Families that Come to Therapy are “Wrong” in their Assumptions

This statement may seem startling at first. What seasoned therapists know, however, is that clients come to therapy because they have a limited view of their situation. Families are “wrong” because they’re certain they know the reality of their situation, and that there are no alternatives to their story. Their ingrained perception is that the problem is an individual experience, rather than one that is maintained by the whole group. As a systemic therapist, you know this is...