Thesis on "Experiential Family Therapy"

Thesis 10 pages (3827 words) Sources: 12 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Experimental Family Therapy

EXPERIENTIAL FAMILY THERAPY

INTRODUCTION myriad of experiences contribute to the fabric of a person's life, however only a few of a person's experiences define him/her. In "Profiles in courage: one lost a parent, one lost his health, one lost her way, and the other sought the family he never knew...," Caroline V. Clarke (2004) recounts stories three individuals shared, regarding some of the, most meaningful, albeit in some instances, painful experiences in their lives, and how these experiences ultimately affected them. Clarke stresses: "A single or loss, an event or crisis, even a book or news story can alter your course forever -- or serve to solidify the path you're already on. It is that lasting, life-affirming impact that makes it what we call a 'moment of truth'." This paper, which explores Experiential Family Therapy, asserts that "moments of truth" uncovered and/or discovered for the first time in a person's experience constitutes the heart of this particular therapeutic process.

In the Dialogical Self in Psychotherapy, Hubert J.M. Hermans, Giancarlo Dimaggio, and Brunner-Routledge, (2004) relate core assumptions that underlie Experiential Family Therapy. Hermans, Dimaggio, and Brunner-Routledge cite Angus and Mcleodn (2004) to assert that this therapy model reflects "a sense of therapist's helping clients to access and differentiate emergent emotion schemes while clients shift to reflexive meaning-making processes in therapy sessions" (Angus & Mcleod, p. 80). Experiential Family Therapy is perceived to be co-constructed, as it arises from the client and therapist intentions being interplayed. In experiential therapy, Angus and Mcleod stress, the disclosure of salient personal memories, along with the client's expression of experiences proves foundational to the inception of change experiences (p. 80),

Experiential Family Therapy Considerations

In "Introduction to a mythical family: How to do Experiential Psychotherapy," Alvin R. Mahrer (2007) argues that no such thing as an "experiential family" of psychotherapies exists. He contends a better perception of the practice could be that it consists of therapy which includes multiple kinships and allegiances with both the experiential and various neighboring families. Experiential psychotherapy, nevertheless Mahrer contends, is traditionally accepted as one of the primary families of psychotherapy. Mahrer notes that a number of therapists, in and out of the "experiential family," trace a part of their history to Carl Rogers and his listening for the feeling in what the client says.

According to Robert Elliott and Leslie S. Greenberg (2007) in "The Essence of Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy," however, Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy does in fact exist, and consists of an empirically-supported, neo-humanistic approach. Experiential Family Therapy assimilates and revises person-centered, Gestalt, and existential therapies. (PE-EFT; Elliott et al., 2004; Greenberg et al., 1993, as cited in Elliott & Greenberg).

Experiential Family Therapy therapists stress the significance of clients' freedom to choose actions during their therapy, as well as, outside the therapy sessions. The therapist's basic stance is to treat clients as experts on themselves. During counseling, "the therapist supports the client's potential and motivation for self-determination, mature interdependence with others, mastery and self-development, including the development of personal power" (Timulak & Elliott, 2003, as cited in Elliott & Greenberg Task Principles section, ¶ 6). The Experiential Family Therapy therapist primarily facilitates the client's growth by tuning into and helping the client explore growth possibilities their experience/s proffer. The therapist may hear, for example, and consequently reflect assertive anger embedded in a client's depressed mood. The client then has to choose how to deal with this anger. The therapist facilitates choice by offering the client "alternatives about therapeutic goals, tasks, and activities. Thus, the therapist might offer a hesitant client the choice not to go into exploration of a painful issue" (Elliott & Greenberg, 2007 Task Principles section, ¶ 6). When clients feel they have the freedom to make choices in and outside of therapy, they more willingly take risks that prove to contribute to their healing in/outside therapy.

At times, as therapists in all counseling methods, experiential therapist will have to deal with impasses resulting from unresolved incidents. Unless resolved, these experiences may block risk taking, and sabotage the family member's creation of new levels of emotional engagement. To effectively deal with impasses, Susan M. Johnson (2004) purports in the Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection, "it is helpful for the therapist to be able to step aside from the pressure to "fix" the problem and to recall that the goal of an experiential therapist is to help clients see, at times with excruciating and tangible clarity, the choices they are making and the choices that are open to them" (p. 209).

When a client grasps his/her experience and creates it with more and more awareness and clarity owns the experience an emotional reality, the reality frequently starts to expand, and in time provides answers.

Fran Harris

During therapy, Fran Harris recounted that one experience that occurred when she was 16 years old. At the age of 38, rippling effects from that experience still affected her (Clarke, 2004). Harris remembers:

had gotten into a student exchange program where you went to live with a family in Mexico for a month," Harris recalls. "My mother was so excited about it. From the beginning, she kept saying. 'You have to go. Don't worry about me. Just go.' I can so clearly remember her dropping me at the airport and saying goodbye." Harris boarded the plane from Dallas to Mexico City. Her mother went home, had a heart attack, and died. (Harris, as cited in Clarke, 2004, Her Mother's Daughter section, 2004, ¶ 3).

During a year of therapy, Harris experienced a number of "moments of truth" that helped her overcome the anger and confusion she experienced, following her mother's death. Therapy helped Harris unload feelings inside her. "It relieved her loneliness and sense of utter isolation and validated what she was going through" (Clarke, 2004, Her Mother's Daughter section, 2004, ¶ 18).

Through therapy, Harris learned a number of things clients in experiential therapy routinely learn:

Feelings are perfectly normal, given a person's experience/s;

Strategies are available to cope with feelings; and Benefits, evolve from the deep necessity, of sharing feelings (Ibid.).

Sharing feelings related to personal experiences, something Harris's family, as a number of families, failed to do, depicts a vital component of Experiential Family Therapy.

Emphatic Understanding

According to Kathryn a. Moon (2007) in "A Client-Centered Review of Rogers with Gloria," emphatic understanding, also a vital component of Experiential Family Therapy, does not automatically occur. It does, albeit, denote the therapist's devotion to "following and grasping the client's communications, intentions, and meanings. 'Thus it means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he senses it, and to perceive the causes thereof as he perceives them' (Rogers, 1959, p. 210, as cited in an Attitudinal Approach section, ¶7). In regard to emphatic understanding, Rogers later noted this to include meaning that the therapist, during a designated time, is lays his/her personal values aside to be able to enter another person's world without prejudice. Sometimes, empathy may arise from interaction with the client, as he/she reveals experiences, and, as required to follow and understand the revelation from the client, the, counsellor/therapist sensitively checks his/her understanding of the client's experience with the client (Brodley, 1998; Raskin, 2005, pp. 330-331; Rogers, 1951, p. 29, as cited in an Attitudinal Approach section, ¶7). Rogers (1980) recounted his growth-model theory of therapy late in his life with the following:

Individuals have within themselves vast resources for self-understanding and for altering their self-concepts, basic attitudes, and self-directed behavior; these resources can be tapped if a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided" (p. 115). The facilitative attitudinal conditions to which he referred are congruence, empathic understanding, and unconditional positive regard. Congruence is the integrated internal state of the counselor, the counselor's readiness for setting aside concerns and personal preoccupations and for being available and open in relationship with the client. Rogers at varying times referred to this condition as genuineness, openness, authenticity, or transparency. These synonyms can be misleading unless understood as complementary to the therapeutic intention to be present and empathically receptive of the client's communications and experience. Shlien (2003) described congruence as "the ability to listen... without being impeded by the reverberations in oneself" (p. 15). The other two facilitative conditions depend on the counselor's congruence, the counselor's ability to attend to the client. (Moon, 2007, an Attitudinal Approach section, ¶ 6)

The Experiencing Scale

Katje Wagner (2006) explores "Focusing" as a psychotherapeutic modality in "Inside out: Focusing as a therapeutic modality." Wagner concludes that "Focusing bridges the subjectivity of experiential psychotherapeutic traditions with the objectivity of scientific realms" Wagner, Conclusion section, ¶ 1). As the method tests cognitive perceptions with inwardly felt phenomena, Wagner explains, it simultaneously engages a number of aspects of one's perceptual capacities. Focusing helps one develop and enhance his/her feeling and thinking abilities. A person's inner experience, according to Focusing, serves as a primary indicator of change, "a phenomenon that applies across therapeutic orientations" (Wagner, Conclusion section, ¶ 2).

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