Ibsen's truth, family secrets, and family therapy

In certain Ibsen plays a character (would-be family therapist) enters during a crisis revolving around family secrets. Taking two such plays as models, this paper examines family processes and clinical issues surrounding secrets and myths. In Ghosts, Ibsen demonstrates the tragic foreclosure visited upon the Alvings' lives by a generation of secrecy. For contrast, in The Wild Duck the would-be reformer Gregers brings out the truth, to expose and correct consequences of his father's past machinations. The biographical roots of Ibsen's obsession with truth and illusion are explored. Lastly, the notion that Ibsen and early family therapist were reformers is viewed in historical perspective.     

Relational information and the context effect in recognition memory

A role for relational information was examined for the paradigm in which recognition-memory performance on items tested in the same context in which they were studied is compared with performance on items tested in different contexts. Over a series of five experiments, randomly formed pairs were used to manipulate the context of high-frequency English words. Comparisons were made between instructional manipulations designed to influence the use of relational information, and between yes/no, confidence rating (both between- and within-subject), and forced-choice tasks. There was a context effect not due to the use of inappropriate response strategies. However, high-criterion subjects resembled those subjects who were specifically instructed to use relational information, while low-criterion subjects showed little or no context effect. A model specifying the relationship between item and relational information and how relational information influences decisions in recognition-memory paradigms was proposed.     

Promoting Recovery Identities Among Mothers with Histories of Addiction: Strategies of Family Engagement

Changes in identity are critical to managing transitions to recovery from substance and alcohol addictions. Identity change is particularly important for mothers, whose recovery processes are often in the context of critical but complex family relationships and societal expectations. But research and practice often underestimate the relational dimensions that promote or inhibit changes in one's identity during recovery. Here we analyze data from a study that involved interviews with 30 formerly incarcerated women participating in a community-based substance use treatment program in the Midwest. Drawing from Constructivist Grounded Theory Methods, our analysis identified three factors shaping levels of engagement with family members: (1) the relational consequences of a shared past; (2) ascribing permanence to the old identity of “addict” versus the ability to see women's capacity to change; and (3) the current provision of caregiving support to participants’ children. Our analysis supports and extends existing research by highlighting how family can both promote and inhibit a recovery identity process. We discuss potential implications for theorizing “recovery” and “identity” as relational and identify key elements to support practices more attuned to the hidden complexity of family support.     

Discovering forgiveness through empathy: implications for couple and family therapy

This article explores the concept of forgiveness in the context of couple and family therapy. Forgiveness is described as a complex psychological and relational process that is more a discovery via understanding and empathy than an act of will. Empathy is related to emotional intelligence, and the developmental and relational benefits of both are discussed. A rationale for viewing forgiveness in a contextual (family of origin), historical and relational attachment paradigm is offered. Relevant clinical cases illustrate the process of forgiveness as discovery in the context of an empathic relational environment where ambivalence is anticipated and respected.     

Working models of romantic attachment and the subjective quality of social interactions across relational contexts

Two diary studies examined the effects of domain‐specific representations of romantic relationships (assessed using the Relationship Questionnaire in Study 1 and the Revised Experiences in Close Relationships questionnaire in Study 2) on the subjective quality of social interactions across four relational contexts: those with a romantic partner, family member, platonic friend, or acquaintance/other. In both studies, domain‐specific romantic attachment, particularly attachment avoidance, was more strongly related to subjective experiences of social interactions involving a romantic partner than those with family members, platonic friends, or acquaintances/others. These results complement previous diary research using earlier categorical measures of attachment and elaborate upon the contextual effects of the attachment behavioral system in naturally occurring social interactions with different relational partners. The conditions under which working models of different relationship domains should influence interpersonal functioning are discussed, and a context‐congruence hypothesis of attachment effects, which encompasses the current findings and generates further predictions, is detailed.     

Understanding families in their own context: schizophrenia and structural family therapy in Beijing

Evidence from a number of family intervention strategies demonstrates a beneficial impact on the course of schizophrenia. It appears that different family interventions have generic features that aid the patient to avoid relapse and improve functioning. A significant challenge for researchers is to modify these generic strategies to be sensitive to different cultural groups in order to ensure their effectiveness. Chinese culture, with its distinct cultural norms governing family interaction and intense stigma towards the mentally ill, would seem to raise a particular challenge.
This paper offers an account of an eclectic model of structural family therapy that incorporates psychoeducation and behavioural treatments for schizophrenia as a theoretical guide to working in a cross–cultural context. A Beijing family, consisting of parents and their daughter with schizophrenia, were seen for sixteen months during a trial of family intervention in China. Through structural family concepts, China's sociocultural context of treatment resource constraints, population policy and stigma are examined and the impact of the illness on family organization is explored.     

Effects of Family Context on Adolescents’ Psychological Problems: Moderated by Pubertal Timing,and Mediated by Self-Esteem and Interpersonal Relationships

We examined the potential mediational roles of self-esteem and interpersonal relationships that link the effect of family context on psychological outcomes in 5214 junior high school students. The moderating effects of pubertal timing were also examined. Pubertal development scores were used to measure pubertal status. Separate mediational models were examined across subgroups with different pubertal timings (i.e., early puberty, on-time puberty, and late puberty). Self-esteem and interpersonal relationships mediated the association between family context and psychological consequences. Although early-maturing adolescents tended to have more psychological problems, they were usually more strongly influenced by self-esteem than were their late-maturing counterparts. Self-esteem and interpersonal relationships were both important when dealing with adolescent psychological problems, particularly for those who mature early. Clinicians should be able to recognize these problems associated with pubertal transition and provide appropriate counseling with a focus on positive adaption to reduce adverse psychological and behavioral consequences.     

Psychosocial Factors Influencing Individual Well-Being in Chinese Adolescents in Hong Kong: a Six-Year Longitudinal Study

This pioneer study investigated the longitudinal development of adolescent subjective well-being (SWB) in terms of life satisfaction and hopelessness. The concurrent and longitudinal influence of different socio-demographic characteristics (i.e., age, gender, economic disadvantage, and family intactness), individual qualities (i.e., resilience, social competence, positive identity, and spirituality), and familial characteristics (i.e., family functioning, and parent-child relationship) on these two aspects of SWB were examined. A total of 3328 Hong Kong students from 28 secondary schools participated in a 6-year longitudinal study. While adolescent life satisfaction showed a declining trend, hopelessness gradually increased across the six years. Resilience, social competence, family functioning, and father-child relational qualities were significant predictors of life satisfaction at the initial status, whereas gender, mother-child relational qualities, positive identity and spirituality predicted changes in life satisfaction over time. Regarding hopelessness, gender, family intactness, resilience, social competence, father-child relational qualities, and mother-child relational qualities were significant correlates at the initial slope, but spirituality and family functioning were the longitudinal predictors of hopelessness over the adolescence period. While the present study showed that some existing Western findings can be replicated in the Chinese context, there are some novel and puzzling observations deserving further scrutiny.     

An interview study exploring clients' experiences of receiving therapeutic support for family estrangement in the UK

Many people experience estrangement from a family member, which is broadly understood to refer to negative relationships that are characterised by little or no contact. However, little is known about how people cope with family estrangement. To address this gap, interviews were conducted with 46 participants who identified as being estranged from a parent/sibling and/or child and having sought therapeutic support for this experience. The participants were recruited from a UK-based charity that supports individuals experiencing family estrangement. The participants had a range of experiences of therapeutic support, with most (N = 31, 67%) having paid for private therapy. The data were analysed using thematic analysis, and three themes were generated: (1) finding the missing qualities in estranged family relationships: warmth, validation and safety; (2) speaking the unspoken: addressing the causes and consequences of estrangement; and (3) learning relational skills: improving the relationship with oneself and with others. When the causes of estrangement were addressed in the context of a safe therapeutic relationship, participants learned strategies to improve the relationships they had both with themselves and with others. When participants experienced a cold or unresponsive therapeutic relationship, and the causes and consequences of estrangement were not adequately addressed or understood, counselling was experienced as unhelpful. Individuals who seek therapeutic support for family estrangement have specific needs. Training around these needs and the causes and consequences of estrangement could be beneficial to helping professionals and the clients with whom they work.     

Risks and costs of a treatment litigation: Focus on the family

Decision-making in special educational settings is always based on an implicit process of assessing risks, costs, and benefits of proposed alternative program options. We urge decision-makers to make the process explicit. The hidden costs of IEP decisions are discussed in the context of the question of using aversive procedures to treat severe destructive behavior. Some agency decisions result in significant cost transfer to or generation of risks and costs for families. The experiences of one family involved in a due process proceeding with a school system are examined for evidence of burdensome psychological, social and financial consequences.     

A Feminist Approach to Family Therapy

Although family therapy recognizes the importance of the social context as a determiner of behavior, family therapists have not examined the consequences of traditional socialization practices that primarily disadvantage women. The unquestioned reinforcement of stereotyped sex roles takes place in much of family therapy. A feminist therapy orientation that considers the consequences of stereotyped sex roles and the statuses prescribed by society for females and males should be part of family therapy practice. This paper describes the ways in which family therapists who are aware of their own biases and those of the family can change sexist patterns through applying feminist principles to such areas as the contract, shifting tasks in the family, communication, generational boundaries, relabeling deviance, modeling, and therapeutic alliances.     

Alternative strategies for creating "relational" family data

A major problem facing family clinicians and researchers is creating data that will reflect the family as a unit. To address this problem, we present a framework for family assessment based on three measurement strategies: individual family member assessment, relational family assessment, and transactional family assessment. Within this context, we present several categories of methods for combining individual family member data into "relational" scores that reflect the couple or family as a unit. The problems and benefits of each method are presented, and it is suggested that the choice of method is dependent upon the content of the assessment, the theory underlying the content, and the statistical properties of the individual family member scores.     

Relational categories are more mutable than entity categories

Across three experiments, we explore differences between relational categories—whose members share common relational patterns—and entity categories, whose members share common intrinsic properties. Specifically, we test the claim that relational concepts are more semantically mutable in context, and therefore less stable in memory, than entity concepts. We compared memory for entity nouns and relational nouns, tested either in the same context as at encoding or in a different context. We found that (a) participants show better recognition accuracy for entity nouns than for relational nouns, and (b) recognition of relational nouns is more impaired by a change in context than is recognition of entity nouns. We replicated these findings even when controlling for factors highly correlated with relationality, such as abstractness–concreteness. This suggests that the contextual mutability of relational concepts is due to the core semantic property of conveying relational structure and not simply to accompanying characteristics such as abstractness. We note parallels with the distinction between nouns and verbs and suggest implications for lexical and conceptual structure. Finally, we relate these patterns to proposals that a deep distinction exists between words with an essentially referential function and those with a predicate function.     

Conceptual combinations and relational contexts in free association and in priming in lexical decision and naming

Words known to have strong associates of a particular relational type were embedded in lists of other words with relations of the same type or in lists of words with relations of a different type (e.g.close-far in a list of other opposite pairs or in a list of synonym pairs). In free association, the probability of a response consistent with the relational context was higher than the probability of a response inconsistent with the context. In lexical decision and naming, significant priming was obtained for related pairs of words only when their relation was consistent with the relational context of the list in which they were embedded. The priming effects were obtained when the stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target words was short (250 msec for lexical decision and 300 msec for naming), indicating that the effects were due to automatic retrieval processes. These findings point to the importance of the particular relations between words in the retrieval of information from memory, an aspect of processing overlooked by current memory models.     

Self-concealers: Do they conceal what we always assumed they do?

The present investigation empirically examined the relation between self-concealment and three secret typologies reported in the literature. For this aim a general population sample of 221 participants completed an online questionnaire that included the Self-concealment Scale (Larson & Chastain, 1990). Respondents also wrote down their most important secret. It was found that SC is positively associated with keeping secrets that concern convictions of personal inadequacy, sorrows, and worries that relate to oneself. In addition, it is concluded that self-concealed information refers in particular to secrets regarding personal inadequacy, sorrow, and worry. Implications for secrecy research are discussed and suggestions for future research are made.     

Familientherapie

In the field of family therapy besides the emphasis on the autonomy of the different schools (behavioral, psychodynamic, systemic), partly motivated by professional politics, a growing openness for concepts developed in other approaches can be observed. Approaches and results of attachment and affect theory and research find their way into the conceptualization of family processes and family therapy. Processes in the “self” of the therapist are taken into the discussion of therapeutic processes in systemic therapies. Furthermore, new fields of application of family therapy approaches have developed: parents-infant therapy and counseling, therapy of the elder, family medicine and coping with the consequences of the “human genome project”. New research on the empirical validation of relational dynamic concepts and on the evaluation of family therapies show a trend to see the claim for making treatments as short as possible in very relative terms. It is assumed that the family therapeutic approach will become more important in the future.     

Does History End with Postmodernism? Toward an Ultramodern Family Therapy*

Although the end of history has often been announced, human thought continues to renew itself, always incorporating, in each of its stages, important aspects of what has come before. In this sense, neither family therapy in general, nor its more particular postmodern orientations, have led to a radical break with the past. Neither can they claim to have reached a comfortable, definitive position. The subjectivist turn that introduced postmodernism into the systemic model has enriched it with important theoretical and practical elements, such as the critique of a therapist's supposed objectivity, circular and reflexive questioning, or the technique of externalization. This article proposes to take the renewal of systemic family therapy farther by addressing still unresolved issues, such as the role of the individual in relational systems, the place of emotions, or the construction of a relational psychopathology. The term "ultramodern family therapy" is proposed until such time as there is agreement upon a better one.     

Relational Lockdown and Relational Trauma† in the Time of Coronavirus: A Reflection from a UK Family Therapist

Like a meteor hitting the earth’s surface, 44, 131 ^‡ unexpected deaths have shaken, disturbed, and saddened the core of our nation. This reflection considers the consequences of the coronavirus crisis in the UK with particular reference to the impact on families and on the practice of family therapists. The perspective presented can only be partial because of the fast-changing situation and the limited access to alternative perspectives that are available during this period of relational lockdown. The author provides a systemic understanding of what has happened and what is happening.     

A Social Network Analysis of Friendship and Spiritual Support in a Religious Congregation

Religious congregations are social settings where people gather together in community to pursue the sacred (Pargament, 2008). Such settings are important to understand as they provide a context for individuals to develop relationships, share ideas and resources, and connect individuals to larger society (Todd, 2017a). Yet, research to date has not deeply examined the inherently relational nature of religious congregations. Thus, in this study, we used social settings theory (Seidman, 2012; Tseng & Seidman, 2007) to develop and test hypotheses about relationships within one Christian religious congregation. In particular, we used social network analysis to test hypotheses about relational activity, popularity, and homophily for friendship and spiritual support types of relational links. Our findings demonstrate how relational patterns may be linked to participation in congregational activities, occupying a leadership role, a sense of community and spiritual satisfaction, stratification, socialization, and spiritual support. Overall, this advances theory and research on the relational aspects of religious congregations, and more broadly to the literature on social settings. Limitations, directions for future research, and implications for theory and religious congregations also are discussed.     

The relationship between relational models and individualism and collectivism: evidence from culturally diverse work groups

Relational models theory (Fiske, 1991 ) proposes that all thinking about social relationships is based on four elementary mental models: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. Triandis and his colleagues (e.g., Triandis, Kurowski, & Gelfand, 1994 ) have suggested a relationship between the constructs of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism and Fiske's relational models. However, no previous research has examined this proposed relationship empirically. The objective of the current study was to test the association between the two frameworks in order to further our understanding of why members of culturally diverse groups may prefer different relational models in interactions with other group members. Findings from this study support a relationship between Triandis' constructs and Fiske's four relational models and uphold Fiske's ( 1991 ) claim that the use of the relational models is culturally dependent. As hypothesized, horizontal collectivism was associated with a preference for equality matching and communal sharing, vertical individualism was related to a preference for authority ranking, and vertical collectivism was related to a preference for authority ranking and communal sharing. However, contrary to expectations, horizontal individualism was not related to a preference for equality matching and market pricing, and vertical individualism was not associated with market pricing. By showing that there is a relationship between Triandis' and Fiske's frameworks, this study closes a gap in relational models theory, namely how culture relates to people's preferences for relational models. Thus, the findings from this study will enable future researchers to explain and predict what relational models are likely to be used in a certain cultural context.