Basic Concepts in Family Therapy: An Introductory Text

Gain confidence and creativity in your family therapy interventions with new, up-to-date research

Basic Concepts in Family Therapy: An Introductory Text, Second Edition, presents twenty-two basic psychological concepts that therapists may use to understand clients and provide successful services to them. Each chapter focuses on a single concept using material from family therapy literature, basic psychological and clinical research studies, and cross-cultural research studies. Basic Concepts in Family Therapy is particularly useful to therapists working in a family context with child- or adolescent-referred problems, and for students and clinicians treating the problems they see every day in their community.

The book builds on the strengths of the first edition, incorporating ideas and articles that have become worthy of investigating since 1990 into the original text. This new edition also introduces five new chapters on resiliency and poverty, adoption, chronic illness, spirituality and religion, and parenting strategies. The new chapters make the book far more relevant for students and clinicians try ing to use family theory and technique in response to the problems they see in their communities.

Basic Concepts in Family Therapy will assist you in offering clients better services by providing a deeper understanding of the contemporary family in its various forms, the psychological bonds that shape all families, and the developmental stages of the family life cycle. This exploration of how family demography, stages and life cycles affect family functions is a solid foundation from which all of the therapeutic concepts in this book can be explored.

Some of the facets of family therapy you will explore in Basic Concepts in Family Therapy are:

• the importance of spirituality and religion in family therapy
• generational boundaries, closeness, and role behaviors
• managing a family's emotions
• defining problems and generating and evaluating possible solutions
• teaching children specific attitudes, values, social skills, and norms
• transracial adoptions and normative processes and developmental issues of adoptive parents
• strategies for reducing conflict
• . . . and much more
  
  Basic Concepts in Family Therapy will help to broaden your understanding of the ways families function in general. You can use the effective concepts explored in this text to make a thorough assessment of the impact of a disorder on a child and on the rest of his or her family, as well as how family dynamics might have shaped or exacerbated the problems. The concepts described in this text can be customized to clients'cultural values to avoid unnecessary resistance. As a new therapist, you will gain confidence in your assessments, and if you are already a seasoned professional, you will gain creativity in your interventions.