FAMILY COUNSELING

Family Counseling



Family Counseling

Introduction

Adlerian Brief Therapy with Families is greatly enhanced in an open-forum setting where multiple families participate in the encouragement of a family-in-focus—and conversely, the family-in-focus educates others. While this process reduces the possibility of guaranteeing confidentiality, it increases the accountability of the therapist and the counseling process.

Human living is influenced by experiences in families and groups. Small children experience parents as both necessary and mysterious; they are curious about everything these important people are doing. The other major influence on young people is the peer group, including siblings, friends and neighbors, and school children about the same age. To be human is to “live” a group experience every day. Within families and peer groups, people come to know themselves, gain a sense of worth, and discover the possibilities available in their lives. Family and peer groups are the fields of our experience. It is the flow of experience, however, that really impacts on development. The first experience that children have at birth is fear.

They are moving from what is known, familiar, and safe (the womb) into an unknown and complex world in which needs are not instantly gratified. With the few resources they have, they immediately start to cope, searching for anything that will make this new world familiar-a heartbeat, food intake, the experience of a mother's skin. As their needs are met, fear is supplanted with temporary joy and an emerging sense of safety. It is from this sense of security that children begin to move in the world. Infants and toddlers naturally seek a balance between safety and movement. Within the family, most children receive enough care and nurturance to survive. Many children take their first steps and speak their first words with parents who are excited by these early achievements.

The presence of parents provides a perceived stability to the world. Their feedback gives children direction and sometimes even the courage to move forward. The more children do for themselves, the more they want to do. Each step leads to new challenges, new roadblocks, new demands for skills and resources that young children have yet to master. Thus, the next most common feeling that youngsters experience is helplessness. Helplessness generates a myriad of other feelings, expressions, and responses: frustration, worry, imtation, hurt, and even anxiety. Perhaps the most common reaction in children to helplessness is the expression of anger and sometimes rage. When these strong emotions are expressed, they inevitably trigger equally strong reactions in adults. Children can never really know that their parents also have fears about their new life with children. They don't know that parents worry about their personal abilities to raise kids. They don't understand their parents' constant concern for the child's welfare and development or the helplessness parents feel when they don't know what to do(Bitter, 1988).

Unlike children, when parents feel worried, helpless, or upset, they tend to implement (and act as if there are) rules that will handle any ...